LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap. Copyright No.. 

ShelfJ&D-!&30 

-— L* 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



^ 



A COUNTRY 
WITHOUT STRIKES. 






3Sp tfie &ame Stutlmr 

<?> 

Wealth Against Commonwealth, 

Labor Copartnership, 

A Strike of Millionaires, 

Newest England, 

Etc. 



A COUNTRY 
WITHOUT STRIKES 



A Visit to the Compulsory 
Arbitration Court of New Zealand 



By / 

HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD 



WITH INTRODUCTION BY 

WILLIAM PEMBER REEVES 

1X-MINISTKR OF LABOR IN NEW ZEALAND 
AND AUTHOR OF THE COMPULSORY ARBITRATION LAW 



NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. 

1900 



1 



•3TWO COPIES RECE1VEU 

Library of CORgcfi^ 

■Jft\S9 of tli 

^5-1880 

agistor of Copyrlg*ft& 



,. 6:1440 

Copyright, T900, 
By Henry Demarest Lloyd. 



SECOND COPY, QL , / 0&S3 



CONTENTS. 



A « PAGE 

Something New in Strikes and Lockouts . i 

II. 

The Shoemaker Sticks to the Last . . 32 

III. 
Better Committees than Mobs ... 61 

IV. 

A New Song of the Shirt .... 89 

V. 

This Law of Parliament Becomes a Law ) 

™ > 114 

of Trade ) 

VI. 
What it Costs and What it Pays . .152 



INTRODUCTION 



It is very often asserted that those political lab- 
oratories, the Colonies of Great Britain, shrink 
from no experiment the object of which is to 
regulate and improve the condition of the la- 
bourer. This assertion is but partly true. The 
British colonies, though^ all endowed with com- 
plete self-governmentf differ very widely in the 
temper in which they approach the labour prob- 
lem. For instance, two of the knottiest ques- 
tions which humanitarian social reformers have 
endeavoured in our time to solve, are confessed- 
ly the conflict of organised capital with organ- 
ised labour, and the necessity of securing a 
minimum of comfort for the humbler class of 
workers. Among eleven self-governing Brit- 
ish colonies two only have made any serious 
endeavour to cope with the second of these 
problems, and one only has made any deter- 
mined effort to grapple with the first. Vic- 
toria and New Zealand essay to control by 
statute wages and the conditions of labour; in 
New Zealand alone the conflicts of labour and 
capital are by law and custom submitted to 
the arbitration of state tribunals. The Victori- 



viii Introduction 

an Factories' Act, to which I have just referred, 
is an extremely interesting measure under which 
the wages paid and certain other conditions 
observed in the clothing, boot and shoe, furni- 
ture-making, and one or two other industries 
are determined from time to time by a state 
board whose rulings have legal force. The 
statute deserves careful study and may be re- 
garded as an experiment kindred to, though by 
no means identical with, the New Zealand In- 
dustrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act which 
is the subject of Mr. Lloyd's book. There are 
theorists and observers in Great Britain who 
think that the Victorian law is more likely to be 
imitated in the large industrial countries of the 
world than that of New Zealand, and that its nar- 
rower scope and more calculable effects render 
it a less venturesome and hazardous experiment. 
There is no doubt something to be said for this 
contention if the object of the reformer be mere- 
ly to better the conditions of the most helpless 
class of workers in the worst-sweated industries. 
But if the object be to find a remedy also for 
those conflicts of capital with labour which have 
agitated the industrial world in Europe, Ameri- 
ca and elsewhere for the past century, which in- 
crease in area and bitterness with each decade 
and which constitute one of the greatest puz- 
zles of social students in the old world and the 
new, then the Victorian Wages Board law is 
not what is wanted. 

The object of the New Zealand Conciliation 
and Arbitration Act is not only to stamp out 
sweating and improve the workers' condition. 



Introduction ix 

These, indeed, were not its immediate aims 
though they are consequences — and very valu- 
able consequences — which have flowed from it. 
Its special and primary object was to bring 
about industrial peace, and, in so far as it has 
substituted orderly and methodical hearing and 
adjudication by impartial state tribunals for the 
loose, violent and haphazard methods of the 
strike and the lockout, it has succeeded in bring- 
ing about industrial peace. 

True it is that an act under which one of 
the parties to an industrial dispute has the 
right to bring all other parties before a pub- 
lic tribunal does, in effect, if general use be 
made of it, involve a great deal of state 
regulation of labour. That is what has come 
about in New Zealand, and those who look 
upon state interference as anathema, and think 
that any law which increases it is necessar- 
ily bad, will regard the arbitration law with 
abhorrence. So far, however, as New Zea- 
land is concerned, a sufficient answer to this 
objection is easily found. In the first place, 
if the parties to labour disputes there wish to 
settle their own differences in their own way, 
the state does not meddle with them. In the 
second place, New Zealand is perhaps the most 
simple and complete little democracy in the 
world; legislation is facile, and were any law 
found tyrannical or intolerable it would have 
very short shrift indeed. In New Zealand, I 
may remark, the most powerful class in politics 
are not the wage-earners but the farmers. 

The Arbitration Act has not yet had a very 



x Introduction 

long life. It was passed in 1894 and did not 
come into active use until more than twelve 
months afterwards. Its popularity and useful- 
ness have, however, steadily increased, and most 
of the organised industries of the colony are 
now being carried on under the conditions laid 
down by its Conciliation Boards and Arbitration 
Court. It should be stated frankly that most of 
the cases brought before these tribunals have 
been initiated by trade-unions and that most of 
the decisions have granted concessions of more 
or less value to the plaintiffs. The explanation 
of this is found in the prosperity which has 
marked the last four or five years in New Zea- 
land. The labour market has been a rising mar- 
ket since the Arbitration Act came into use. 
Under the old conditions the workers whose 
wages had been cut down in the dull times of 
the previous decade would have struck on a 
rising market as they strike elsewhere. Instead 
of striking on a rising market they have arbi- 
trated on a rising market, and instead of 
the industries of New Zealand being convulsed 
and disorganised the factories have not been 
closed through labour troubles for one single 
day. 

Next to the wide use which has been made of 
the law in the colony, the most striking feature 
of its history has been the respect that has been 
paid to its decisions. Where, as in certain cases, 
these have been disappointing to the trade-un- 
ions they have been loyally obeyed ; and though 
in a few instances the same cannot be said for 
the employers, the recalcitrants have not been 



Introduction xi 

many, they have not been employers of great 
size or standing, and their attempts at resistance 
or evasion have been sufficiently dealt with by 
small fines and very moderate penalties. 

The only serious argument — beyond the theo- 
retical objection to state interference in any 
form — which has been brought against the law 
by English writers has been a statement that 
it has hampered enterprise and checked the 
growth of manufactures in the colony. New 
Zealanders know this to be quite baseless, for 
they know that the manufactures of their colony 
have fully participated in the prosperity of the 
last quinquennium. For some years past, la- 
bour in almost every trade has been fully em- 
ployed, the numbers of the workless have fallen 
progressively, fresh factories have been opened, 
fresh buildings erected, and the shopkeepers 
who deal with the working classes admit that 
business is better and bad debts fewer than at 
any time in the last twenty years in the colony. 
The annual reports of the Chambers of Com- 
merce and the periodical reviews of trade and 
business published by the New Zealand newspa- 
pers on both sides in politics tell the same tale. 
But the briefest and most convincing argument 
for disabusing the mind of any one who may 
fancy that the New Zealand Arbitration Act 
has hampered industry is to be found in the fol- 
lowing figures which give the hands employed 
in the registered factories of the colony for the 
last five years. It may be explained that "fac- 
tory" in New Zealand means workshop, small 
or large, and that registration is universal. 



xii Introduction 

Year, Hands Employed. Increase. 

1895 29,879 4,028 

1896 3 2 >387 ^508 

1897 36,918 4,531 

1898 39,672 2,754 

1899 45,305 5,633 

It may be, and indeed, has been, stated that the 
strength of the law cannot be fully tested until 
some powerful organisation of labour or capital 
defies the decision of the court and is success- 
fully dealt with. English doctrinaire critics lay 
great stress on this and are wont to ask tri- 
umphantly what could be done with the mem- 
bers of a large trade-union without funds to 
enable them to pay the court's penalties for dis- 
obedience and at the same time stubbornly de- 
termined not to go to work under the conditions 
laid down by the court. The answer to that is 
surely found in a study of the history of la- 
bour disputes. These show that it is not unions 
destitute of funds which carry on. stubborn and 
ultimately successful strikes. And if impecuni- 
ous workers cannot successfully cope with the 
antagonism of employers whose resources are 
after all limited, how can they expect to cope 
with the power of a state tribunal whose will 
is not to be bent, which has no factory to be 
closed or business to be injured, and which is 
backed by the forces of law and public opinion ? 

To my mind, however, the best recommenda- 
tion of the New Zealand law is just that it has 
not, so far, led to any desperate trial of strength 
of this kind. By applying the good old motto 



Introduction xiii 

that prevention is better than cure it has taken 
labour disputes in hand before they have reached 
that pitch at which the passions of the dispu- 
tants on both sides are inflamed and impel them 
to wild speech and wilder action; it gets at la- 
bour and capital before they have come to the 
unreasonable stage of their quarrel. It frankly 
accepts their two irresistible tendencies in mod- 
ern times ; the first of which is that they will dif- 
fer and the second that they will organise in 
order to settle their differences. There are phil- 
anthropists who think that the remedy for their 
conflicts is found in urging them not to quarrel 
and not to organise; there are some who would 
sternly forbid them to organise. The New 
Zealand law, on the contrary, frankly encour- 
ages their organisation, admits that they are 
bound to differ, and only insists that if they 
cannot settle their differences in a friendly and 
peaceable manner they must go to the state, 
which will provide them with machinery for 
doing so. 

The state, in New Zealand, is the people, and 
the people being vitally interested in labour bat- 
tles, has surely the right to say to the parties 
that their disputes shall be adjusted in such a 
manner as not to damage the community of 
which they are members and for the benefit of 
which in the end their industry is carried on. 

For the rest, the Act's methods are elastic, and 
the proceedings of its tribunals are open, pains- 
taking and fair. 

I am, of course, in no way responsible for 
the views expressed by Mr. Lloyd in this 



xiv Introduction 

volume. Before Mr. Lloyd went to New Zea- 
land, I had never seen him, and it was not until 
he had been to the colony and returned from it 
with his views upon the Arbitration Act fully 
formed, that I had the pleasure of meeting him. 
But though his opinions are his own, I may be 
allowed to say that, as regards his statements 
on matters of fact, I believe them to be correct 
throughout. In America and Europe his stand- 
ing as a writer will, of course, ensure his book a 
welcome among all social students ; and both in 
Great Britain and the colonies I feel no doubt 
that those who are interested in the experiment 
he here describes will gladly welcome the impar- 
tial opinion of an able American observer stand- 
ing absolutely apart from the political parties of 
New Zealand. 

W. P. Reeves. 

London, England, March, 1900. 



A COUNTRY 
WITHOUT STRIKES. 



A COUNTRY WITHOUT STRIKES 



CHAPTER I. 

SOMETHING NEW IN STRIKES AND 
LOCKOUTS. 

When I landed in New Zealand in February, 
1899, I found it, like the rest of the world, in 
the flooding tide of a new prosperity; the rev- 
enue of the government increasing, manufac- 
tures extending, new enterprises starting, labour 
busy. 

As always happens in a country so fortunate 
as to have workingmen intelligent enough to 
know what is going on, those here knew about 
this rising market and were striking everywhere 
for their share of it. They were demanding 
more wages, shorter hours, better conditions, or 
at least the restoration of advantages which had 
been taken from them during the preceding 
years of "the lean kine." 

I knew, of course, by my reading, something 
about the new way these things were managed 
here, and almost my first request was to be taken 



2 A Country Without Strikes 

to see a New Zealand strike. My friend smiled 
and led the way. We were driven to a charm- 
ing spot in Christchurch, bordering on "The 
Domain," or public park on the banks of the 
Avon where English willows turn their hoar 
leaves to a stream as beautiful as its namesake. 
We approached an interesting Gothic building 
which did not look like a factory or trades-union 
hall, and passed into a long, open room, with 
vaulted ceilings, galleries, stained glass win- 
dows, all familiar to any one who has been in 
the Parliament buildings at Westminster. It 
was a New Zealand miniature of the House of 
Commons — the Hall of the Provincial Assem- 
bly of Canterbury. 

A table ran along the centre of the hall; on 
each side of it three or four men, the brighter 
toilets and the better grooming of those on one 
side showing them to belong to a different class 
from those on the other, whose plain clothing 
and furrowed faces bespoke them to be working- 
men. They were busy in controversy, and be- 
tween them, at the head of the table in the white 
wig of an English chief- justice, was a judge of 
the Supreme Court of New Zealand. On 
benches under the windows were newspaper re- 
porters, and a number of spectators belonging 
evidently to the same classes of society as the 
men sitting beside each other at the table. 



In the Court Room 3 

I know a strike when I see it, for I have wit- 
nessed a good many, including the Pullman 
strike at Chicago, but this looked like no meet- 
ing of strikers I had ever known. It looked like 
a court, though, again, not like any I had ever 
seen before. 

But it was both. "For five years," said my 
New Zealand friend, "there has not been a 
strike or a lockout in New Zealand that has not 
been held in a court-room." 

This was my introduction to the Compulsory 
Arbitration law of New Zealand. 

"But compulsory arbitration, you know," said 
a young Englishman who was with us, fresh 
from Oxford and post-graduate courses of po- 
litical economy from John Stuart Mill to 
Boehm-Bawerk, "is an impossibility; it is a con- 
tradiction in terms. You cannot make men 
work whether they want to or not, you cannot 
compel men to arbitrate nor fix prices by law. 
You cannot get practical decisions in business 
matters from judges who 'know nothing of 
business/ you cannot settle wages and condi- 
tions of labour by laws of the legislature in- 
stead of the laws of supply and demand." 

"That 's what all 'the authorities' of the busi- 
ness world and political economy say," our New 
Zealander replied, "but what they say we can't 
do, we are doing. Under this law, when with- 



4 A Country Without Strikes 

out it they would have stopped, for five years 
not a workingman nor capitalist has stopped 
giving or taking work on account of any differ- 
ence as to wages, or any other matter at issue 
between them, and yet during all that time they 
have been in sharp and frequent disputes on 
many questions/' 

"The New Zealanders must be a nation of 
visionaries," the Oxford man insisted, "to be 
willing to venture on such a Utopian experi- 
ment.' ' 

"On the contrary, 'the experiment/ instead of 
being a scheme of visionaries, or Utopians, or 
theorists, was forced upon us by the hard pres- 
sure of actual facts and by intolerable evils, 
in the paralysis of industry and the disturbance 
of peace, for which all other remedies have 
failed. The experiment was entered upon with 
the consent substantially of all parties in Parlia- 
ment, including some of the most successful 
business men in the colony. It is an experiment, 
we admit, and a bold one, without parallel any- 
where else in the world, but it is a successful ex- 
periment, and so far has done lots of good 
and hurt nobody." The traveller is not in New 
Zealand very long before he finds out that its 
people are a little proud of their "experiments," 
and it takes him only a little while longer to 
make up his mind that they have good reason to 
be proud of them. 



Civil War 5 

"With your Conciliation and Arbitration 
Boards, public and private, and your Conseils des 
Prud'hommes and the like/' continued our 
friend, "you are all saying to the warring forces 
of labour and capital, 'you ought to arbitrate.' 
New Zealand is the first to say, If you ought 
to arbitrate, you shall arbitrate.' " 

The newly arrived traveller hardly knows 
which way to turn, there are so many novelties 
to see in a country like New Zealand. Its whole 
career has been a continuous experiment, from 
zoological to sociological, and it has been speci- 
ally experimenting in business and politics for 
thirty years, ever since Sir Julius Vogel, in 1869, 
established the government in life insurance, 
which it has made a great success against the 
competition of the principal private companies 
of Australia, Europe and America. But the 
statements my New Zealand friend whispered to 
me, as we stood under the gallery of the Arbi- 
tration Court, decided me that, compulsory arbi- 
tration had the first claim on my curiosity. 

New Zealand had a terrible strike nine years 
ago, known as the Maritime Strike. It devas- 
tated the whole of Australasia. It was a war 
between classes, the only two classes practically 
which remain to be amalgamated in modern 
society. It spread from the shipping world, 
where it began, into a great circle of related in- 
dustries. Merchants and their clerks drove 



6 A Country Without Strikes 

drays and loaded and unloaded merchandise; 
shipowners and their sons and friends took the 
place of sailors and stokers; the country went 
to the edge of civil war. The New Zealand 
Minister of Labour, the Honourable William 
Pember Reeves, set himself, in the following 
year, to find a remedy to prevent the recurrence 
of struggles not less terrible in the sum-total of 
losses than war itself. There had been no com- 
pulsory arbitration anywhere to serve as a guide; 
there had been no public conciliation or arbitra- 
tion in New Zealand itself to supply any prece- 
dent. "But New Zealand," the New Zealander 
who was •giving me these points continued, with 
pardonable pride, "did not waste any time in be- 
ginning w T here others had begun. It took up 
the evolution where the others had dropped it, 
and carried it forward. It was characteristic 
of the country that the new opportunity found 
the new men fit for it." 

The Maritime Strike was over, but other com- 
ing labour troubles clouded on the horizon, and, 
most threatening of these, a possible strike of the 
government employes on the railroads. This, 
as the Minister of Labour said to Parliament, all 
must admit, would be the greatest possible 
calamity that could befall. 

With the memory of the Maritime Strike be- 
fore him and these other dangers threatening, 



No Precedents 7 

the Minister of Labour set himself to study the 
most difficult of labour problems. He investi- 
gated all that has been done in other countries 
— in England, France, Germany, the Australian 
Colonies and the United States. The speeches 
in which he reported the results of his studies to 
Parliament in introducing the bill which he 
framed, stand to-day as the best study which has 
been made of arbitration and conciliation. He 
found, as he said in offering his bill, that the ex- 
perience of other countries, confined as it had 
been to voluntary conciliation and arbitration, 
was a record of failure wherever it was most im- 
portant that it should succeed, and of success 
only when success was comparatively of little 
consequence. Almost never was any great 
strike settled or prevented by voluntary concili- 
ation and arbitration ; only the little ones. 

He read all that has been written by the au- 
thorities on conciliation and arbitration, and 
found nothing new in them. They all seemed, 
he said, to have copied from each other. 

He reviewed for Parliament and the New 
Zealand public the three laws of Great Britain, 
passed in 1824, 1867, and 1872, all three dead 
letters on the statute book. 

The Conseils des Prud'hommes of France, 
which have had eighty years of practical work- 
ing, are a valuable example of what may be done 



8 A Country Without Strikes 

by state intervention in industrial matters, but 
they have not put an end to strikes. 

"There are many and grievous strikes in 
France, because these Conseils des Prud'hommes 
are not allowed to deal with strikes or wages 
and have no power to enforce their decisions. ,, 

He found the Massachusetts Board of Con- 
ciliation and Arbitration one of the most suc- 
cessful and practical tribunals in the world. It 
was in fact almost "an ideal tribunal, its one 
fault being that it is voluntary. It does a great 
deal of good, but if you look through the record 
of its cases, you will find a doleful and depress- 
ing list of failures as well. In small cases the 
intervention of the board had been successful, 
that is, if passion has not been roused. In larger 
cases, or where one side has had its passion 
roused, the board has not been so successful, and 
the strikes have had to go on." But he found 
it "the one voluntary state tribunal that seems to 
do good work." 

Mr. Reeves studied his subject for years. He 
told the Parliament there was not an industrial 
conciliation and arbitration tribunal in any part 
of the world, the working of which he had not 
examined. His conclusion was, "that in Eng- 
land, throughout Europe, in America, and in 
Australia, voluntary arbitration has failed for 
generations. It is necessary to try something 



Conciliation does not Conciliate 9 

else, and I ask you to try compulsory arbi- 
tration." 

A very striking instance of the failure of vol- 
untary arbitration was furnished by the recent 
experience of the neighbouring colony of New 
South Wales. That colony had, the year be- 
fore New Zealand acted, passed an act which 
seemed to be, Mr. Reeves said, "a very nice act." 
Immediately thereafter New South Wales saw 
the three most disastrous and ruinous strikes the 
colony had had since its foundation. These 
strikes took place as soon as the act was passed, 
and it proved a dead letter. If the act had not 
been passed, these strikes would have compelled 
the Legislature of New South Wales to legislate 
in an effectual way, but, as it was, the leaders 
had a reason in the existence of the law for 
doing nothing. As a result of these three 
strikes, the CoaL Miners' Strike, the Broken Hill 
Strike, and the Shearers' Strike, homes had 
been broken up, employers ruined, the town of 
Broken Hill made bankrupt, men had lost their 
homes and their work, their families had been 
disrupted, labour leaders had been thrown in jail, 
to be kept there for years, and a very bitter class 
feeling excited which still rages throughout 
New South Wales. 

"That," said Mr. Reeves, "has been the result 
of trusting to voluntary tribunals." 



io A Country Without Strikes 

He showed that, at the time he was speaking, 
there had been in Europe in the preceding five 
years nearly two thousand strikes, and through- 
out the world at large many thousands of strikes 
involving the loss of hundreds of millions of 
dollars, besides other things not to be counted in 
money. In proposing compulsory arbitration, 
he said : 

"I could not bring in a bill of a weaker char- 
acter than this without knowing that it would 
be a hollow sham. I have studied the history 
of conciliation and arbitration in the various 
countries of the world, both old and new, and I 
have been forced to this conclusion that, if you 
pass a merely optional measure, you will put a 
thing on the statute book that will have no effect 
whatever in assuaging the evils arising through 
industrial contests. Only too thankful should I 
be to pass an optional measure now, and thus 
save myself all the friction attending this fight, 
and also save myself the great responsibility of 
passing a measure with a compulsory clause, but 
I cannot pass a useless bill." 

"Strikes," he said again, "have done a great 
deal of good, but strikes are war. War is a 
clumsy and barbarous way of settling differences 
between nationalities, and strikes are the most 
clumsy and barbarous way I know of settling 
industrial difficulties." 



Labour Asks for Compulsion 1 1 

"Victory by either side is not a proof that the 
side which lost was wrong, or that that which 
won was right." 

The trade-unions of New Zealand, during the 
discussion of this matter which was before Par- 
liament for years, held up the hands of the 
Minister of Labour by passing resolutions de- 
manding compulsion, and many of the leading 
capitalists and employers of the colony gave 
him^their support. 

He quoted to Parliament a telling remark 
made to him by a Manchester merchant, a man 
who had had great experience in connection 
with unions. 

"If you are to have arbitration at all, it would fi 
be of no use, if you do not make the awards I 
compulsory. Every man who thinks he is going 1 
to lose a strike is ready to go to arbitration, while 
the man who thinks he is going to win will not J 
have it" 

Conciliation boards are virtuallv useless un- 
less there is in the background an arbitration 
court, and this court must have compulsory/ 
powers. 

That the bill which he drafted was an experi- 
ment, "an absolute experiment," Mr. Reeves ad- 
mitted. He claimed only, he said, that "It was 
an honest attempt to solve the most difficult of 
labour problems. It is an experiment that is 



12 A Country Without Strikes 

worth trying. Whatever it does,. it cannot do a 
vast amount of harm to the colony." 

The opponents of the bill had said that such 
a question must not be dealt with in an experi- 
mental way. 

"In Heaven's name," replied Mr. Reeves, "if 
we are not to deal with it in an experimental 
way, how are we to deal with it at all?" 

"Every good and great change in the world 
has been an experiment. The man who discov- 
ered America made an experiment. Every 
great scientific invention has been arrived at by 
experiment, and, in the same way, in legislation 
we have to make experiments." 

The Minister of Labour admitted the imper- 
fections of this bill. "It is ridiculous," he said, 
"to suppose that at one bound this Parliament 
can solve a problem that has puzzled the most 
earnest thinkers for generations." But he be- 
lieved that, if the experiment had a fair trial, it 
would succeed, and that "New Zealand will 
have set an example to the civilised world which 
will be widely followed in days to come." 

Mr. Reeves submitted his first bill to Parlia- 
ment in 1892. It was offered again in 1893 and 
in 1894. Three times it passed the lower house 
before the upper house would allow it to become 
a law. So convincingly had the Minister of 
Labour marshalled the results of his studies of 



Parliament Almost Unanimous 13 

conciliation and arbitration in other countries, 
and defended his main point that compulsion 
was indispensable, that the bill at last, in 1894, 
passed without change in its fundamental prin- 
ciples, and with the concurrence of the leader of 
the opposition and several of its most important 
members — a most unusual circumstance in a 
country where party spirit runs as high as it 
does in New Zealand. 

"I believe," the leader of the opposition said, 
"that we have to a great extent the very best bill 
that can be devised in the interest of the 
colony." 

The act has now been in operation five years, 
and with such general approval that recent 
amending acts have been passed almost without 
dissent. The law was proposed as an experiment 
— it is still regarded as an experiment by its au- 
thor, and even by the judges of the Arbitration 
Court and by the country — but so far it has 

proved a workable experiment. 

There has not been a strike by organised 
labour, with one insignificant exception, since 
its passage. It has harmonised all the labour 
troubles brought under its cognisance. The 
courts have been constantly strengthening them- 
selves and the acts by their administration of it. 
Capital has not fled, but, on the contrary, in- 
dustries of all kinds have been flourishing as 



14 A Country Without Strikes 

never before. There have been a few attempts 
to evade or disregard the decisions of the 
courts; these the judges have proved them- 
selves fully able to control and punish. Al- 
though the decisions have almost all been in 
favor of the men, because it is a time of pros- 
perity and their demands have been made on a 
rising market, the employers have found no 
serious embarrassment in complying with them, 
and some of the employers are the strongest 
supporters of the measure. 

To declare a new social right and to create a 
new court to enforce it in a field where there 
w r as nothing to guide and nothing to be copied, 
and where, still worse, all the authorities deny 
the right and predict complete failure for the 
enforcement, was certainly as bold a venture as 
reformer entrusted with power ever attempted. 
Merely to draft so unprecedented a law with 
such skill that it could go into practical opera- 
tion as this has done, is a legislative feat of the 
highest order. 

Speaking of the pains he had taken, Mr. 
Reeves told Parliament, "I have had this bill 
drafted, and in some cases re-drafted, and 
drafted and drafted again and again/' 

A law essaying compulsory arbitration in 
South Australia has been on the books about the 
same time as the New Zealand law and remains 



Failure in South Australia 1 5 

a dead letter, not a single case when I was there 
having been tried under it. 

The lawyer, journalist, poet, politician, who, 
as Minister of Labour, had the wit to contrive 
a measure which could give five years indus- 
trial peace to his country, is not likely to be as- 
signed a back seat among social inventors. 
However his experiment may turn out, it is cer- 
tainly one of the most original pieces of work 
done in modern times. But if the ' 'experiment' ' 
ripens into an established institution, no one will 
be able to dispute the claim of Mr. Reeves to 
stand in the front rank of the geniuses who have 
proved themselves able to affect human destiny 
for good, by carrying constitutional and politi- 
cal development a step farther, bettering the life 
of man with man by bringing new evils under 
the dominion of the old principles of social jus- 
tice and mercy. 

When I asked Mr. Edward Tregear, the ac- 
complished Secretary for Labour, who has the 
congenial task of carrying on the work Mr. 
Reeves began, for a copy of the Compulsory 
Arbitration Law, he handed me a bulky pam- 
phlet entitled "The Labour Laws of New Zea- 
land." 

The arbitration law has to be studied in sev- 
eral acts contained in this collection. There is 
an urgent need of a consolidation act for these 



1 6 A Country Without Strikes 

various enactments, and for want of it the task 
of accurately ascertaining the definite provisions 
of the law is a complicated one. 

Its main points are : 

i. It applies only to industries in which there 
are trade-unions. 

2. It does not prevent private conciliation or 
arbitration. 

3. Conciliation is exhausted by the state be- 
fore it resorts to arbitration. 

4. If conciliation is unsuccessful, the dis- 
putants must arbitrate. 

5. Disobedience of the award may be pun- 
ished or not at the discretion of the court. 

The compulsion of the law is threefold: 
compulsory publicity, compulsory reference to a 
disinterested arbiter — provided the disputants 
will not arbitrate voluntarily — compulsory obe- 
dience to the award. 

It does not forbid nor prevent disputes, but 
makes the antagonists fight their battles in court 
according to a legal code instead of the ordinary 
"rules of war." 

There is no "making men work by law," and 
no "fixing wages by law." The law says only 
that if they work, it must be without strikes or 
lockouts, and that, if they cannot agree as to 
prices, the decision shall be left to some impar- 
tial person, and not fought out. 



The People Initiate 17 

In fuller detail these are the principal features 
of the law. 

The state takes no initiative in setting arbi- 
tration in motion. The law acts only as one party 
or the other calls for it — and in this the New 
Zealand law differs from that of South Australia. 
It simply provides the law and the tribunal by 
which either party, employer or employed, may 
sue and be sued instead of striking or being 
struck. 

The Minister of Labour in submitting the 
bill avowed himself to be in favour of giving the 
state an initiative, but he thought that the peo- 
ple were not yet ready for it. I found that 
where, as in South Australia, the arbitration 
law gives the officials of the state the power to 
intervene of their own motion, nothing has been 
done. But in New Zealand, where the people 
must initiate whatever is done, the law has been 
in constant use. 

No disputes can be considered except in 
trades where there are trade-unions, and only 
where these trade-unions have registered under 
the law. This is, first, to save the court from 
being overwhelmed by a flood of petty matters, 
and, second, because the disputes that threaten 
the peace and prosperity of society come from 
organised not unorganised labour. 

"On the whole/' Mr. Reeves said, "history 



1 8 A Country Without Strikes 

shows that the great and dangerous battles be- 
tween capital and labour — those which may seri- 
ously call for state intervention — occur only 
where labour is organised." 

There is in this no disregard of the interests 
of the poorest and most numerous labourers — 
the unorganised — for any seven men can form a 
trade-union under the act and claim all its privi- 
leges, nor is it in disregard of the interests of 
men in a trade who are outside the union, for, 
as will be explained later, there is a way in 
which their grievances can be espoused by the 
union in their trade. To encourage working- 
men and capitalists to organise unions, they are 
given corporate rights; they can sue and be 
sued; they can recover subscriptions from de- 
faulting members, and have power to buy or 
lease land. The law does not interfere with the 
right of labour and capital to settle disputes by 
private arbitration, if they wish to do so. On 
the contrary, it supplies forms for procedure in 
such cases and provides for the enforcement of 
the awards, if the parties agree in advance that 
this shall be done. 

There are two kinds of tribunals : Boards of 
Conciliation and a Court of Arbitration, and in 
both the workingmen and the employers are 
equally represented by men of their own choice. 
There is a Board of Conciliation in every "in- 



Labour and Capital Equal 19 

dustrial district/' and the country is divided 
into as many industrial districts by the Gov- 
ernor-General as seems advisable. There is 
but one Court of Arbitration for the whole 
country. 

The Boards of Conciliation have four to six 
members, and are chosen every three years in 
each district by elections held separately by the 
associations of employers and the association of 
employes, under procedure carefully arranged 
by law, and under the supervision of a govern- 
ment officer called the Clerk of Awards. The 
boards upon organisation elect as chairman an 
outsider, " some impartial person," and "willing 
to act." The chairman votes only in case of 
a tie. 

The Court of Arbitration consists of three 
persons who hold for three years, appointed by 
the Governor-General, and of the three ap- 
pointees, one must be chosen by him from men 
nominated by the workingmen, and one from 
among men nominated by the capitalists. The 
third is a Judge of the Supreme Court. This 
democratic representation of labour and capital 
insures to each throughout the proceedings that 
their interests are protected by men of their own 
class, familiar with the conditions of their life 
and industry. It insures that the casting vote 
of the chairman is given with men by his side 



2o A Country Without Strikes 

to make clear all the technicalities and difficul- 
ties of the questions at issue. 

The selection of a Judge of the Supreme 
Court to preside and to give the final and deci- 
sive vote, satisfies the contestants and the people 
that the state, on its side, contributes to the in- 
quiry and the decision the best that it has of 
dignity, experience and impartiality. 

If the question before the board or court is 
of more than usual complexity, two experts may 
be chosen by the two parties to act as full mem- 
bers of the court, and to see that the decision is 
made with full understanding of all the points. 
Experts are frequently called in in this way. 
For special emergencies there may be special 
boards elected. 

Neither board nor court intervene in any dis- 
pute of their own motion, but like other courts 
only when one of the parties or both appears be- 
fore them. The compulsion in the law is not 
that the state of itself compels the parties to 
arbitrate, but that if one desires to arbitrate in- 
stead of fighting, the state says the other must 
not fight but arbitrate. 

The moment either side with a grievance, or 
any apprehension of a strike or lockout, sum- 
mons the other before the board or court, it 
becomes a punishable offence for the workmen 
to stop work, or the employer to close down. 



Looking Backward 21 

Both must keep on until the board or court has 
come to a final decision. 

The law goes beyond this prohibition of 
strikes or lockouts while disputes are pending 
before the court. There must be no strike or 
lockout beforehand to forestall such interven- 
tion. The act guards against the probability 
that workingmen might be discharged, or the 
employer be left by his men because one side has 
learned that the other is about to demand concili- 
ation or arbitration. In such cases, if there has 
been any such discharge or lockout to evade an 
arbitration, the aggrieved party may, at any 
time within six weeks after the strike or the 
lockout, appeal to the court and get full consid- 
eration and redress, and the court can stop the 
strike which it was denied the chance to prevent. 

The necessity for such action as this was 
shown in a case which arose in South Australia, 
where certain workingmen resolved to try arbi- 
tration, but the employer getting wind of what 
was coming, promptly discharged all his hands. 
He then said to the court that it had no jurisdic- 
tion because there was no dispute between him 
and his men, meaning the men he had taken on 
afterwards. "It is quite true," he said, "that I 
had a dispute with certain men, but they are no 
longer my employes." This New Zealand 
clause gives the state power, if invoked, to step 



22 A Country Without Strikes 

in and stop strikes or lockouts, even though they 
have broken out. 

Employers can summon their workingmen 
only as members of a trade-union, but the men 
can call in individual employers as well as asso- 
ciations of employers; otherwise these could 
defeat the act by refusing to organise into asso- 
ciations. If the labourers or capitalists choose to 
sacrifice the benefits of the act by giving up their 
unions, they can do so, but only in ways pro- 
vided by law, and not during the progress of 
any arbitration nor to escape compliance with 
an award. Workingmen can leave their unions 
only by giving three months' notice. 

Both the Boards of Conciliation and the Court 
of Arbitration have summary powers of visiting 
any premises and questioning any persons con- 
cerned in an industrial dispute. They can 
compel the attendance of witnesses and the pro- 
duction of any books and papers needed, and 
can imprison anyone refusing to obey their sum- 
mons. Every precaution is taken by the act to 
prevent injurious publicity of the secrets of 
business. Usually the hearings are public, so 
that public opinion may be properly informed, 
but the court can at any time, at its own discre- 
tion, or the request of any of the parties, go into 
secret session. 

No lawyer is allowed to appear before the 



Quick Justice 23 

boards or the court, except by consent of both 
parties, which is practically never given. 

The Boards of Conciliation have no other 
powers than those of investigation, visitation, 
and intermediation. 

The proceedings before the boards and the 
court are very simple, informal, cheap, and ex- 
peditious. The board is required to make its 
decisions within two months, the court within 
one month after the investigation begins. An 
association of employers or workingmen wish- 
ing to summon a trade-union, makes an applica- 
tion on a printed blank to the board in writing, 
which thereupon takes up the case. 

"The board can make all such suggestions 
and do all such things as appear right and 
proper to secure a fair and equitable settle- 
ment." 

The Boards of Conciliation can make decis- 
ions, but the decisions are not binding, and it is 
the successful party, therefore, who must appeal 
to the Court of Arbitration. 

The Court of Arbitration is a court with or- 
dinary and extraordinary powers. It can sum- 
mon any party to a dispute which is before it to 
appear, and, if he refuses, can proceed without 
him. It can enter and investigate any premises 
and question any persons there without warrant. 
It can permit any party who might appear to 



24 A Country Without Strikes 

have a common interest in the matter to be 
joined in the proceedings. It can receive such 
evidence as it thinks fit "whether strictly legal 
evidence or not." It has the power of other 
magistrates to take evidence at a distance. 
None of its awards can be set aside for any in- 
formality ; it is required that they be not framed 
in a technical manner. They cannot be "chal- 
lenged, appealed against, reviewed, quashed, 
or called in question by any court of judicature 
on any account whatsoever." 

The board is to make its decision "according 
to the merits and substantial justice of the case," 
and the Court of Arbitration "in such manner 
as they find to stand with equity and good con- 
science." 

The members of the board and courts are 
paid moderately only while sitting and wit- 
nesses are compensated for the loss of time and 
for their travelling expenses, but no costs are to 
be allowed in any case whatever for any agent, 
counsel or solicitor to appear for either party. 
The fees and travelling expenses of members of 
the court are met out of the general funds of the 
colony. It is felt to be better public policy that 
the whole community should bear this than to 
run the risk that poor men might suffer injustice 
because they could not afford the expense of ap- 
pealing for justice. The expenses of witnesses 



Insuring the Future 25 

are charged as costs to the disputing parties. It 
has been proposed that the compensation of the 
members of boards and the court be always 
charged to the disputants in order to prevent 
trivial and excessive litigation, but this has been 
negatived for the reason of public policy just 
given. 

To check frivolous and causeless appeals to it, 
the court is authorised to dismiss any such cases 
and to assess all costs upon the offender. 

Business men are protected from the injustice 
of being put to a disadvantage, perhaps ruinous, 
by an award giving their employes pay, hours or 
concessions which their competitors do not have 
to give. There is a provision by which all the 
employers in the district, or in the whole 
country, if the court so decide, can be brought 
in and made parties to the procedure and sub- 
ject to the award. 

All trade-unions concerned can be similarly 
brought in. Any employer or association of 
employers, and any trade-union, although not 
summoned but wanting to appear, may be ad- 
mitted by the court. 

The court can adjust its decisions to the cir- 
cumstances of the district or country at large, 
and can vary them as it thinks proper with re- 
gard to individuals or trades to secure fair play 
for all. 



26 A Country Without Strikes 

An award settles wages or other conditions 
in question for two years, if a shorter time is 
not specified by the court. Any person joining 
any union or association may be made subject 
to any award which has been previously ren- 
dered affecting it. 

Any workman may stop work and any em- 
ployer shut down .during arbitration or after 
an award, provided he can show the court that 
he did so for some good reason, such as the un- 
profitableness of the business — any reason other 
than to escape or defeat its jurisdiction. But 
if he wants to resume during the life of the 
award, he can do so only by obeying all its 
terms. The law cannot be evaded or ignored. 
Employers cannot escape it by refusing to or- 
ganise, for they can be brought up singly. They 
can refuse to attend only at the same risk as 
in other courts of having the case go against 
them by default. If they refuse to exercise 
their right of electing representatives on the 
boards and the court, the state does it for them. 
The workmen in any trade can keep themselves 
out of reach of the law by neglecting to organ- 
ise, but they would have to be practically unani- 
mous in this, for any seven of them could form 
a union and bring every one else concerned, em- 
ployers and employes, organised or not, before 
the court. 

Violation of an award is not necessarily an 



Punishment 27 

offence. It is left to the court to decide whether 
such a breach shall be punished or not. Of 
course, as a matter of fact, the court does as a 
rule make disobedience of the award an offence 
and punishable. But with a practical foresight, 
which in a new field like this looks much like 
genius, the author of the law left this matter 
within the discretion of the gourt. 

"The court," said Mr. Reeves, "might make 
an award which possibly any employer would 
rather break than attempt to carry out. It 
might make an award that members of unions 
would be prepared to go to prison rather than 
obey, and under these circumstances the best 
thing is to leave it to the good sense of the 
court. We cannot picture to ourselves the in- 
finite diversity of cases that will come before the 
court. There will be many awards that can be 
made binding and some which it would be folly 
to make binding." 

Trifling with the awards is likely to prove an 
expensive amusement. The court determines 
for itself what constitutes a breach and does not 
have to define this in advance at the time of 
making an award. It may, at any time during 
the life of its decision, adjudge any obnoxious 
thing which has been done to be a violation of 
its award, and may punish it. This is as broad 
as the powers of courts in contempt cases. 

A penalty running up to twenty-five hundred 



28 A Country Without Strikes 

dollars may be imposed for violation of an 
award. No more than this can be laid on any 
party and no more than this can be exacted 
under any award from all the parties to it. 

"In addition to that," Mr. Reeves explains, 
"the court has the ordinary power of proceeding 
by committal or attachment against any one 
who defies it. This power would be used very 
reluctantly and sparingly, should all other 
means fail. Public opinion generally would 
support it. On the other hand, it is not likely 
to be required." 

One fine of twenty-five hundred dollars then 
would exhaust all the powers of punishment by 
fine under one award, but a business men's asso- 
ciation, trust or monopoly, or a great trade- 
union, thinking to secure immunity for a con- 
tinued violation by one payment of twenty-five 
hundred dollars, would be easily made subject 
to a new award and to as many more awards as 
might be necessary to make them good citizens. 

"No one could by simply paying a single 
fine," says Mr. Reeves, "snap his finger there- 
after at the court. He could, of course, be 
brought before it again and again, and might 
have to pay fines until he was tired." 

The order of the court for such a fine may be 
filed in the other courts and becomes enforceable 
as a judgment. If the property of a trade- 



An Anomaly 29 

union or association of business men is not suf- 
ficient to pay the fine, the individual members 
are liable, but only to the amount of fifty dollars 
each. 

Through a defect in the law at first the only 
punishment for a violation of the terms of a de- 
cision that could be enforced was imprisonment. 
This was felt to be so harsh a method of dealing 
with behaviour but newly made legally penal, 
that the judges evaded it by taking advantage 
of every possible technicality, and the working- 
men, even where they felt themselves aggrieved, 
would not ask for the infliction of so severe a 
punishment. The law has now been changed so 
that the money penalty can be enforced, and the 
judges show no hesitation in applying it, and 
the offenders show no hesitation in submitting. 

Many of the disputants, knowing that there 
is an appeal to the Court of Arbitration and de- 
termined to take advantage of it, make their ap- 
pearance before the Conciliation Board little 
more than a formality. They frequently an- 
nounce in advance that they do not mean to 
abide by the decision of the board. Since there 
are no means of enforcing its award, it is the 
successful party before the board who has to 
appeal. To meet this anomaly of appeal being 
forced upon the successful party and to give the 
Conciliation Board a greater importance, it has 



30 A Country Without Strikes 

been proposed to alter the procedure so that the 
loser would have to appeal. The Secretary for 
Labour says on this subject, in his report for 

1897: 

"When the whole Board of Conciliation is 
unanimous, that is to say, when the employers' 
representatives, the workers' representatives, 
and the chairman, all agree that certain things 
should be done, the board should have the same 
power as the higher court to make its award 
binding on both parties. In some cases at pres- 
ent, the time of members of the board is wasted 
because the intention of the litigants is to take 
the case to the Court of Arbitration under any 
circumstances in order that the award may have 
the force of law. This is an injustice to the 
board and a waste of public money." 

Mr. Reeves told Parliament that ninety cases 
out of one hundred would probably be settled by 
the Conciliation Boards, and would not go to 
the Court of Arbitration. One of his sup- 
porters prophesied that the court would not be 
used once in twenty years. 

In practical operation only one third of the 
cases have been settled by the Conciliation 
Board without an appeal to the court, but a large 
majority of its decisions have been sustained 
upon appeal; that is, in most cases, those who 
refused to abide by the recommendations of the 



Hears Both Sides 31 

Conciliation Board, have wasted their own and 
their opponent's time, money, and pains by forc- 
ing an appeal to the court. This is likely to be 
recognised and to bring it about in time that the 
appeals to the court will become less frequent. 

The law secures that the public gets both 
sides of every dispute, and gets them from the 
chosen representatives of each side. Public 
opinion is the arbitrator in such matters in the 
long run, and the public of New Zealand is the 
only one which has seen to it that it shall have 
the facts on which to form itself. 

The government is not obliged to arbitrate 
with its own employes as the law now stands. 
As passed originally by Mr. Reeves, railroad 
employes, the largest and most important class, 
were included; but a change in the system of 
management from Commissioners to a Minis- 
ter of Railways took them out from under the 
act. There is a strong demand that the govern- 
ment shall not continue to exempt itself from 
the same rule it enforces on others. This was 
the only change recommended by the annual 
conference of the Trade and Labour Councils of 
New Zealand, at Christchurch, in April, 1899. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE SHOEMAKER STICKS TO THE LAST. 

It was more than a year before a case was 
tried under the act, but its influence was felt im- 
mediately. It had been passed in August, 1894, 
to go into effect in January, 1895. The first case 
came up in May, 1896. In the meantime, many 
of the trade-unions and a few associations of 
employers registered. Although the law had 
been framed by one of their friends and passed 
with the help of the labour members, the 
workingmen looked the new automobile over 
very carefully before accepting the invitation to 
ride. Their scrutiny satisfied them that, though 
the act was not perfect, it was a good thing. 
Mr. Reeves was able to announce to Parliament 
by September, 1895, that "sixty-one trade- 
unions, the pick and flower of the labour of the 
colony, had come in under the original act pre- 
pared to surrender their right to strike — pre- 
pared to submit their disputes to fair arbitration 
and conciliation. Employers, too, were being 
registered and more unions were registering." 

32 



Arbitration that Arbitrates 33 

He was speaking to a bill which he had sub- 
mitted for some improvement in the machinery 
of the Arbitration Courts. The main argument 
which he advanced to secure the support of Par- 
liament for the amending bill shows on what 
practical grounds this legislation for arbitration 
had been entered upon. He warned the mem- 
bers that industrial troubles of the most serious 
nature were impending and likely to eventuate 
within a few weeks. 

"There was a reason and a grave reason why 
the arbitration act should be brought into oper- 
ation, and within a few weeks brought into 
operation it would be." 

The warning of Mr. Reeves had reference to 
threatened disturbances in the shoe trade, which 
had been for years in a disorganised condition. 
This time, thanks to the Arbitration Act, the 
outbreak which he feared was averted. 

He was able to announce a few weeks later to 
an interested house that there had just met in 
Christchurch an important conference between 
the federated boot manufacturers and the asso- 
ciated unions of their workmen. The anxiety 
which had been felt in regard to that conference 
was now at an end. Both parties had entered 
into an agreement not to have any strike or 
lockout, but to refer any disputes to arbitration. 

"This was the first practical use that had been 



34 A Country Without Strikes 

made of the industrial Conciliation and Arbitra- 
tion Act in actual differences of opinion between 
employers and employed, and the honourable 
members would no doubt share with the gov- 
ernment the pleasure of knowing that the em- 
ployment of the industrial Conciliation and 
Arbitration Act should have been of such a 
practical and friendly character." 

The next year the strike thus averted came up 
but with features never seen before. Instead of 
all the manufacturers and all the employes 
going into a pitched industrial battle, eleven 
men represented all the contestants on both 
sides, like the champions in some Italian battle 
in the Middle Ages. This was the first case 
under the arbitration law, and the case has con- 
tinued to be before the court, coming back in 
one shape or another through all the years 
since. It was a very important struggle in it- 
self, and its career in the Arbitration Court 
illustrates nearly every phase of the new kind of 
strike New Zealand has invented, that in which 
justice strikes a balance. 

The story of the relations of the shoe manu- 
facturers and their men, before the Arbitration 
Court was established, exhibits both masters 
and men in the trade struggling with almost 
desperate energy to establish voluntary concili- 
ation and arbitration. They tried by every 



Compulsion by Minorities 35 

private means to achieve the blessings of indus- 
trial peace, by conference, reason and consent. 

They failed in this private effort because of the 
ugly and short-sighted obduracy of a few manu- 
facturers. Then the new court was opened and 
we see the stability and prosperity which pri- 
vate conciliation could not give them introduced 
successfully and established and maintained 
by compulsory arbitration. We see compulsory 
arbitration doing just w T hat the majority of the 
masters and the men tried to do, but could not 
because of a selfish minority. 

Compulsion thus gives not only peace, but 
liberty — the will and the power to do right — 
liberty to work, liberty to contract with each 
other, liberty to live harmoniously, liberty to 
enjoy the fruits of honest capital and honest 
industry. 

The history of their experience previous to 
the creation of the state tribunal, and after- 
wards, has been published by the trade-unions 
of boot makers in pamphlet form for general 
distribution. They gave it this publicity be- 
cause they realised the unique interest it gained 
from the fact that they had been the first to take 
advantage of the new law, and because they 
hoped that it would serve as a guide to other 
unions who might find it necessary to avail 
themselves of this means of settling disputes. 



36 A Country Without Strikes 

The boot trade of New Zealand had been in 
continual ferment for many years, up to 1890, 
the year of the Maritime Strike. The relations 
between manufacturers and workingmen had 
been relations of constant antagonism and dis- 
satisfaction. Suspicion, ill-feeling and a strong 
sense of injustice had been engendered on both 
sides. Some solution of the difficulty came at 
last to be felt by all as a necessity. This feeling 
was intensified by the shock given to every one 
by seeing the country go to the verge of civil 
war in the Maritime Strike. One of the main 
causes of the friction and of the strikes which it 
caused had been the demand of the union that 
only unionists should be employed, and their 
insisting on "the custom of the trade" not to 
work with non-unionists. The Boot Makers 
Union took the lead in opening the path to peace 
in 1 89 1. They pressed the manufacturers to 
imitate them by joining together in association 
in order that then by conference they might find 
a basis for working with mutual concessions. 

The outcome of this invitation from the boot 
makers trade-union to the manufacturers of the 
colony was an acceptance and a conference 
which met in Wellington, the chief city of the 
colony. This. conference resulted in agreement. 
The employers and the men established local 
and central Boards of Arbitration and Concili- 



Their Voice for War 37 

ation on which members of both sides should be 
equally represented. They thus initiated the 
same procedure which the arbitration law after- 
wards adopted. 

"When the meeting finally closed both mas- 
ters and men expressed their complete satisfac- 
tion with each other," says the history published 
by the trade-union, and "their trust that a new 
era had dawned and that hereafter the relations 
might be of a kindly character, the old differ- 
ences healed by peace and goodwill from one to 
the other." 

But to the surprise and dismay of their repre- 
sentatives — as well of the employers as of the 
men — after they had thus succeeded in harmo- 
nising their differences and providing means of 
arbitrating future differences, they were in- 
formed that a few manufacturers of one city — 
Auckland — a very small minority of the whole 
trade, would not accept the action of the con- 
ference and would not abide by the results. The 
delegates of these manufacturers in the confer- 
ence made no secret of the fact that they were 
personally desirous that their principals, the 
Auckland employers should join with the others, 
but these obstinately refused to do so, and the 
peremptory word was sent from Auckland that 
the employers there refused to be bound by any 
decision arrived at. The Auckland manufac- 



38 A Country Without Strikes 

turers were not themselves a unit in this action, 
but, of course, this attitude on the part of a few 
was enough to shatter all that had been done. 

What was known as the Auckland Strike, a 
very ugly, obstinate and expensive struggle, 
followed, and lasted about six months. During 
the progress of this strike, the representatives of 
the manufacturers of all the principal cities, in- 
cluding some in Auckland, united with represen- 
tatives of all the trade-unions in the shoe indus- 
try in New Zealand, to issue a manifesto to 
the public. This explained the pains that had 
been taken by the majority of the manufac- 
turers and all the unions to secure harmony, and 
the adoption of a rational method of concili- 
ation, and how this had been defeated by the 
contumacy of an intractable minority of guerilla 
competitors. 

"The late conference/' they said, "brought 
about the establishment of good feeling between 
workingmen and manufacturers. The former 
were satisfied with the action of the latter, and 
they, in return, acknowledged the fair spirit in 
Avhich the men considered every subject submit- 
ted for consideration. Courts of Arbitration and 
Conciliation were provided for, strikes almost 
considered an impossibility, while the future re- 
lations of the employer and employed presented 
a brighter aspect than has ever before existed." 



A Losing Victory 39 

'That a few manufacturers," these manufac- 
turers and unionists concluded, "shall be able to 
gain a victory in a fight against reasonableness 
and fair play, we refuse to believe. Bad will it 
be for all, themselves included, if they do suc- 
ceed, for once again fighting, dissatisfaction and 
discord will be introduced in the relation be- 
tween employers and employes, and the last 
state probably will become worse than the first." 

But "the few" manufacturers did win. Their 
victory, however, was as predicted dearly won. 
As a result of the defeat of the men and the 
breakup of the workers' union, and the filling of 
the factories by the manufacturers with non- 
union and boy labour, the employers, the la- 
bourers and the community suffered losses 
easily pointed out. Many small factories 
were started, and in a short time the com- 
petition became so keen that a number of 
manufacturers decided that it was not worth 
while to continue in business. The public suf- 
fered because the cost of production became 
greater than it would have been if the big manu- 
factories had been going, and the class of work 
done became inferior. The boys who were put 
in place of men did not learn their trade thor- 
oughly, and, when their apprenticeship was 
finished, had to accept work at a less rate than 
journeymen, and the men, of course, suffered, 



4-0 A Country Without Strikes 

for those who continued to work had to put up 
with an uncertain employment and fluctuating 
wages. 

These evils led to another conference after 
the strike, and an agreement was reached in 
1892, which, like the one before it, provided for 
a general Board of Conciliation and Arbitration 
for the trade. This agreement kept peace for 
three years, until near the end of 1895, an d suc- 
cessfully arbitrated several serious disputes. 

At its expiration an attempt was made to 
form another, but some of the manufacturers 
refused to come to terms. They followed up 
this refusal to renew the old agreement by pro- 
mulgating a new and harsh schedule of wages, 
rules and conditions, changing the men's posi- 
tion seriously for the worse. The men refused 
to accept these new terms. 

The situation then was this, said one of the 
labour men who had a vigorous vocabulary, 
"Should the vast majority of the manufacturers 
and the employes and the general public who 
wanted arbitration and peace, stability and pros- 
perity, lose them to enable a few cranks or 
crooks of competition to get the start of hu- 
maner men? The right of 'free contract/ 
'managing my own business/ 'liberty/ for 
which this minority held out against the rest of 
the trade and the community, was nothing more 



Using their Democracy 41 

nor less than a right to sneak, cheat, cut and 
steal away their neighbour's business and prop- 
erty by cruel employment and cruel competition. 
The bulk of the trade could gain no advantage 
from letting these men have their own way, for 
many of them would be driven out of business 
by the cuts in prices which cuts in wages 
would make possible. The supreme law in New 
Zealand, as everywhere else, is the general wel- 
fare. There,' as elsewhere, a part is not to be 
allowed to make itself greater than the whole. ,, 

This crisis in the shoe trade came just at the 
moment when public opinion in New Zealand, 
worn out with the evils of strikes, had resolved 
to find a substitute. The people were sick of 
battle-field arbitration, and wanted court-room 
arbitration, and what they wanted they gave 
themselves, like good democrats. 

The answer of New Zealand to intractable 
minorities, either of trade-unions or employers, 
who wanted to fight when everybody else 
wanted peace, was that arbitration was the only 
ethical and economical way to settle otherwise 
irreconcilable disputes. The overwhelming ma- 
jority of the whole people wanted it, the public 
welfare and public morality agreed in demand- 
ing it, and therefore "You must arbitrate." 

When the ethical convictions and the eco- 
nomic interests of a vast preponderance of the 



42 A Country Without Strikes 

community unite as to the need of a change, 
that change will surely come. No Anglo-Saxon 
community that has reached this state of mind 
has ever yet hesitated to pass any "compulsory 
law" necessary to enforce the demands of public 
opinion. 

The compulsion, let it never be forgotten, was 
not that employers or workingmen must do 
business at "prices fixed by law and force." The 
compulsion was that they must settle these 
prices by arbitration instead of vendetta. The 
compulsion was to arbitrate. The arbitration 
being by an outsider, an impartial and com- 
petent person, would decide on prices that would 
be fair to all. If there must be a sacrifice, it 
would apportion it justly. If there was a profit, 
it would see that all got their share of it. 

Another disastrous strike would ordinarily 
have followed the action of the manufacturers 
when the agreement of 1892 expired in 1895. 
But in the meantime the Compulsory Arbitration 
law had come into effect, and the men, with the 
encouragement of many of the manufacturers, 
sick and weary with finding themselves back 
where they had been, after seven years of hard 
work to make strikes impossible, resolved to see 
if the new machinery of the state could not be 
used to put an end to this chronic war, and give 
them — what they had failed to get by private 
effort — lasting peace. 



No Lawyers 43 

Under the act the men could have called the 
manufacturers before the court whether they 
wanted to come or not. But, perhaps, because 
they thought a conciliatory tone was more be- 
coming in appealing to a Board of Conciliation, 
they wrote their employers asking them if they 
would meet them before the board. The manu- 
facturers assented. 

The men were also entitled, under the act, to 
a continuance of the then rates of wages and 
other conditions, without change during the ar- 
bitration. But here again, they preferred to 
seem to receive as a favour that which they 
would have had now as a right. They asked the 
manufacturers if, pending the arbitration, the 
old rules and rates would remain in force. To 
this the manufacturers also assented cordially, 
as they could easily do, since they would have 
had no right to refuse. 

The men asked for the privilege of having 
counsel, but the manufacturers replied that they 
did not intend to be so represented, and there- 
fore must deny the request. 

The proceedings before the Board of Concili- 
ation opened with an amicable compliment from 
the principal representative of the manufac- 
turers. 

"First of all," he said, "I should like to com- 
pliment the employes on taking the course they 
have, and not going out on a strike, which 



44 A Country Without Strikes 

•would have been a deplorable thing to do. I 
hope we shall work harmoniously together and 
do the thing which is just and right." 

A later remark by one of the manufacturers 
before the board shows how tenaciously they 
clung to what has always been the principal con- 
tention of the manufacturers in these disputes — 
their right to ignore the organisation and the 
representatives of their men. 

"I must say at once/' said this representative 
of the Manufacturers' Association, "on behalf 
of the manufacturers, that they will not for a 
moment negotiate with outside persons. They 
will not deal with irresponsible bodies, or with 
men not in their employ.' ' 

But this brave talk did not prevent their com- 
plying with the order of the court when it was 
given, that they should deal with unions of their 
men, whether they chose to designate them as 
"irresponsible bodies" or not. 

The aw r ard of the Board of Conciliation was 
accepted by the manufacturers, but rejected by 
the men, and an appeal was taken to the Court 
of Arbitration. 

It is noteworthy that the first trade to try the 
new tribunal was one in which a voluntary Con- 
ciliation Board had been organised by both 
sides, and had settled satisfactorily all disputes 
referred to it, and had lapsed only on account of 



A Point for Employers 45 

the refusal of a few among the employers to 
renew the arrangement. 

If the men were right in the point they made, 
quoted above, as to the expensiveness of the 
manufacturers' victory to themselves, they 
were, in making this appeal to the Arbitration 
Court, fighting the cause of the majority and 
the better class of the manufacturers as well as 
their own. 

That an Arbitration Act can operate as 
much for the protection of employers against 
guerilla competitors as for the protection of 
labour against capital, is one of the great dis- 
coveries being made by experience in this ex- 
periment. Manufacturers in New Zealand are 
beginning to see this and take advantage of it. 

I learned of several cases in which, by assist- 
ing their employes to organise and appeal to the 
Court of Arbitration, the manufacturers sought 
to obtain decisions which would bind not merely 
themselves, but also their uncontrollable com- 
petitors. Such a competitor can by this use of 
the Arbitration Court be prevented from mak- 
ing the cuts in wages which enable him to cut 
prices to the ruin of all who do not imitate him 
in squeezing out of the employes the funds to 
fight business rivals. 

Like the strike that had preceded it, this con- 
test with the masters before the Board of Con- 



46 A Country Without Strikes 

ciliation and the Arbitration Court lasted six 
months, from May until November. But with 
what a difference. One had stopped the fac- 
tories and brought misery and distress to thou- 
sands of men, women and children. The other 
took only a dozen men from their counting- 
rooms and the working-bench. While they 
debated, the industry went on, wages and profits 
rolled in their accustomed channels into the 
hands that earned them. One strike in this 
trade had cost the men alone thirty thousand 
dollars, and had created the angriest feelings. 
But the arbitration was a quiet, almost friendly 
debate, and the participants, speaking in public 
and before the court, had to control their tem- 
pers and their tongues. 

At the close of the case, his Honour, the pre- 
siding Judge, complimented both sides on "the 
thorough and clear way in which the matter 
had been presented and the good feeling which 
had been shown.' ' 

He requested that one representative of each 
side would remain in attendance to instruct the 
court, if any techincal points should arise that 
needed further explanation. The Judge said 
that the court hoped to be able to give a decision 
on the following day, but it was a fortnight be- 
fore he and his associates were ready with it. 

The court laid down a rule of the greatest 



Preference for Trade -Unionists 47 

interest, which has since been followed. The 
workingmen had asked for an award enforcing 
the "custom of the trade" and directing the 
manufacturers to employ only trade-union men. 
While this was refused, the court held that 
members of the union should be given employ- 
ment in preference to non-members, provided 
"there are members of the union who are 
equally qualified with non-members to perform 
the particular- work required to be done, and 
ready and willing to undertake it." 

This position was taken by the court because 
it was found to have been the custom of the 
trade to employ trade-union men, and the Court 
of Arbitration has, throughout its career, fol- 
lowed the conservative policy of making its 
award conform as closely as possible to what is 
proved to be the practice. 

It has, for example, in other cases, declined 
to give trade-unions this preference where it 
was shown that they had not previously achieved 
any such preference for themselves. 

Another reason given by the court for this 
preference was the wording of the title of the 
act. This then stood as originally passed, "An 
act to encourage the formation of industrial 
unions and associations, and to facilitate the 
settlement of industrial disputes by conciliation 
and arbitration." 



48 A Country Without Strikes 

The court held that the title must be consid- 
ered as part of the act in determining the inten- 
tion of the legislature. 

This policy of giving trade-unions preference 
wherever possible, without disturbing the set- 
tled practice of the business, has since been fol- 
lowed by the court, and it is one of the most 
important rules of action established under the 
arbitration law of New Zealand. 

While giving members of the union prece- 
dence in employment in this case, the court re- 
quired that non-union and trade-union men at 
work side by side should work harmoniously, 
under the same conditions, and receive equal 
pay for equal work. The employer was ex- 
pressly conceded "the fullest control over the 
management of his factory/' with full liberty 
"to introduce machinery without notice," with 
no restrictions upon out-put or the method of 
working. 

The hours were limited to not more man nine 
in one day, nor more than forty-eight in a week. 
Extra pay for overtime was given. The num- 
ber of apprentices to be employed in each de- 
partment was definitely fixed. Ten dollars a 
week was established as the lowest rate to be 
paid. "The minimum wage" this is called. 

Superior men were given as much more as 
they could earn. The rates of piece-work were 
fixed in proportion. 



The Minimum Wage 49 

The court dealt with the question of the pay 
of inferior men as well as of the average work- 
men. There would, of course, be men who 
could not earn even the minimum, but whose 
services would still be needed by their employ- 
ers. These could be given work, but their 
wages were to be determined, if any question 
arose, by the Board of Conciliation. 

To prevent sweating, it was required that all 
work should be done in the shops. 

The trade custom of Boards of Conciliation 
and Arbitration within the trade itself, for 
which the better class of manufacturers and the 
workingmen had so bravely contended, was re- 
stored, and a full and exact constitution for 
these boards was laid down, and they were 
given, within the trade, the powers of fixing 
prices, determining conditions and settling dis- 
putes, which the Court of Arbitration itself pos- 
sesses for all industries. This power to create 
trade tribunals of conciliation and arbitration is 
one of the most important functions of the New 
Zealand Court of Arbitration. 

This settlement was achieved with average 
justice to all concerned because, for one reason, 
the parties to the dispute had had to make public 
all the conditions of their industry, and to have 
them attested by witnesses and experts, handled 
in the ways usual in courts. 

This ability of each side in the Arbitration 



50 A Country Without Strikes 

Court to subject the claims made by the other 
to the fullest examination was in striking con- 
trast to their helplessness previously. 

One of the most interesting pages of the his- 
tory of the boot trade dispute published by the 
trade-union, is that in which it recites, and an- 
swers as it can, the assertions made by the Auck- 
land manufacturers who refused in 1891 to be 
bound by the results of the conference. These 
assertions when made had been met in the mani- 
festo of the employers and the workingmen 
simply by counter-assertions, for this was the 
best that they could do in the days when there 
was not yet compulsory publicity. 

The Auckland manufacturers, for instance, 
had asserted that living was cheaper in their 
town than elsewhere, and that the men were 
equally well off with smaller wages than else- 
where. To this the manifesto had to content 
itself with replying : "No proof has been given, 
and probably the difference, if any, is infinitesi- 
mal." But when statements like this were 
made before the Court of Arbitration proof had 
to be brought. The Auckland manufacturers 
had to back up their assertions with actual facts 
and figures subject to all the sifting and testing 
processes of court procedure. 

Another claim which the Auckland men had 
made was that they bought their materials 



Compulsory Truth 51 

cheaper, and hence charged less for their goods, 
and another, that the wages their men earned at 
present were large enough. To all these state- 
ments their opponents could make no adequate 
reply when there was no Arbitration Court or 
Conciliation Board; but when these were once 
in operation, no assertion of that sort could 
avail the manufacturers who made it unless they 
were prepared to substantiate it with indisput- 
able evidence, which could stand cross-examin- 
ation and pass muster with experts and judges 
trained to deal with all kinds of mystification, 
statistical and otherwise. 

Statements like these were made before the 
Arbitration Court, but now they were investi- 
gated by the representatives of labour and capi- 
tal. All the necessary books had to be pro- 
duced, experts were called in, and questions of 
fact were all disposed of in a way which made it 
impossible to doubt that the truth had been 
ascertained. 

The court had the power to make its decision 
binding on the trade for two years, but it 
thought it was wiser, as it was the first decision, 
to let it run for only one year. 

At the end of the year, the dispute broke out 
afresh. The two associations of masters and 
men had a meeting and agreed that it was of no 
use to go before the Board of Conciliation, for 



52 A Country Without Strikes 

neither side would rest until it had, first, ex- 
hausted its last chance of getting what it wanted 
by going to the court of last resort, and second, 
had got a decision which it knew it had to obey, 
whether it wanted to or not. 

In other words, both sides wanted compul- 
sion, not conciliation ! 

The employers, as the remark quoted by one 
of their number at the beginning of the concili- 
ation had foreshadowed, made their principal 
stand against that part of the decision which 
gave preference to trade-unions. There were 
other points at issue, but the main fight was on 
this. 

The men wanted forty- four hours a week; 
the manufacturers were willing to continue 
forty-eight hours- a week, and the court held 
with them. 

The manufacturers agreed to the average 
wage of ten dollars a week. The workingmen 
were denied some increases of pay they asked 
for instructors' apprentices and for skilled men 
to put at work on machines, but they were given 
increased rates for piece-work. Some of their 
demands as to the limitation of the number of 
apprentices were conceded, others refused. 

The employers made no opposition to the 
provision, designed to put an end to sweating, 
that all work should be done in the factory. 



The Sore Point 53 

Both sides agreed that new machinery could 
be introduced at will by the employer. 

The sore point with the manufacturers was 
that they were forbidden to employ non-union 
men until they had given places to all the union 
men who were competent and willing to do the 
work. This was threshed out again as it had 
been at the first hearing. The manufacturers 
were resolved that, as they had said, they would 
not deal with "irresponsible bodies/' nor nego- 
tiate with "outside persons,' ' meaning delegates 
of the trade-unions. 

The Boot Makers demanded that — 

"Employers shall employ members of the New 
Zealand Federated Boot Makers Union in pre- 
ference to non-members, provided there are 
members of the union who are equally qualified 
with non-members to perform the particular 
work required to be done, and are ready and 
willing to undertake it." 

The Employers, that — 

"Employers shall not discriminate between 
members of the New Zealand Boot Trade 
Union and non-members." 

The court made its decision in the exact lan- 
guage of the employes. This time it made its 



54 A Country Without Strikes 

award binding for two years, the full limit al- 
lowed, until September I, 1900. 

For six years then, from September, 1895, 
until September, 1900, the manufacturers and 
the men in the boot trade will have been en- 
abled, notwithstanding many serious differ- 
ences, many of them still existing, to go on 
working. For six years they will have had no 
strikes, no lockouts ; there will have been no un- 
expected demands by the men, no sudden cuts 
by the masters. These six years have been 
years of constant dispute, but there has not been 
one day's idleness, not one day of passion, not 
one blow struck. Both sides are still contend- 
ing, but they continue at work and are pros- 
perous. 

When the two years' period expires in 1900, 
the same peaceful means of settlement will be at 
the disposal of both sides, and both will no 
doubt, as they have already done, decline con- 
ciliation and choose compulsory arbitration be- 
cause it is compulsory, and guarantees finality 
and certainty and equal conditions for all. 

Very likely, however, by that time the two 
parties in this trade will do as others have done 
under the new regime, they will agree to go on 
according to the terms fixed by the court with- 
out troubling it again. Or, they may follow 
still a different course, as has also occurred in 



The Better Way 55 

another trade. They may ask the president of 
the court to meet with them informally, and, 
after an amicable conversation, make a volun- 
tary agreement along the lines suggested by 
him. 

Is not this a civilised way for civilised people 
to settle their differences? If there is a better, 
where is it to be found ? In such wholesale dis- 
aster as that of the strike in the quarries of Lord 
Penrhyn, or at Homestead, or in the complete 
paralysis that for months last year held almost 
all the industries of Denmark in its grasp? 

The representatives of the boot manufactur- 
ers' associations pleaded almost piteously before 
the court that they would be ruined if it granted 
the demands of the men. The court, these rep- 
resentatives pleaded, could bind their associa- 
tion, but "it had no power to bind outside boot 
factories, and this would give those outside the 
association unfair advantages, as they would be 
quite unrestricted as to wages and conditions 
under which they, as employers, should work. 
This would cripple the others who belonged to 
the association." 

The court dignifiedly allowed this limiting 
construction of its powers to pass uncorrected. 
But an opportunity soon came to show whether 
it had power to bind outside manufacturers, and 
would have the courage to use it. 



56 A Country Without Strikes 

There were three men not in the manufac- 
turers' association, employers of non-union men, 
and they disregarded the award which had been 
made against those inside the association. The 
workingmen of the union at once summoned 
them before the court. They were able to do 
this because the act is purposely so framed that 
workmen can proceed as well against individual 
employers as against associations of them. The 
court decided that these manufacturers must 
adhere to the same wages and other conditions 
as those which it had fixed for members of the 
manufacturers' association. But — and this is an 
illustration of the practical and conservative 
temper in which the judges have always admin- 
istered the act — the requirement that trade-union 
men must be given preference was waived. 

Throughout its decisions, the court has 
shown that its aim was to preserve as nearly as 
possible the conditions in which it found the 
trade. It has constantly endeavoured to avoid 
becoming a disturbing element in business, or 
a legislator of new conditions. 

Preference in this case was waived for the 
reason that these outside manufacturers repre- 
sented a branch of the industry in which the 
men were as yet hardly organised. The court 
therefore only stipulated that there should be no 
discrimination against the trade-unionists, and 



No Free Lances 57 

required the outside manufacturers to keep all 
the other conditions imposed upon their com- 
petitors. 

When the first award against the boot manu- 
facturers' association expired, in December, 
1897, these outsiders were, of course, also re- 
leased, and they at once resumed their former 
attitude of free lances. The decision already 
described regulating the trade until September, 
1900, was, as the previous one had been, also 
disregarded by these outsiders. 

Again the trade-union called them before the 
court, and this time they were sharply handled 
there. The trade had by this time got into a 
condition which, in the opinion of the judges, 
made the preference to trade-unionists advis- 
able, and they did not repeat their former in- 
dulgence of waiving it in behalf of these 
manufacturers who did not wish to join the 
manufacturers' association, or to carry on their 
business by the same methods their competitors 
were compelled to observe. 

The presiding judge said that the conditions 
of the boot trade had been exhaustively dealt 
with by the court, and it had rendered decisions 
which it had meant should settle matters for 
the whole colony. Employers who sought to 
carry on their business on conditions other than 
those governing the trade generally, would have 



58 A Country Without Strikes 

to show good cause why they should be allowed 
to do so. 

The court then called upon these would-be 
free lances to show why they should not be 
bound by the award. It did not trouble the 
trade-union to make any statement on its side. 
The defendants pleaded that they had "consci- 
entious scruples about belonging to the masters' 
association/' and they also said they had a per- 
fect right to employ workingmen who, like 
themselves, had scruples about joining a union. 

His Honour said the court had nothing to do 
with such scruples. It would not be in viola- 
tion of "conscience" for them to abide by the 
rules which applied to their competitors in the 
same business. 

These manufacturers obstinately contended 
that they were not bound to join the masters' 
association. The judge said that there was no 
desire to force them to do so, but they must 
come under the same conditions as their com- 
petitors. All the employers had contended be- 
fore the court, he said, that they should have 
liberty to employ whom they chose, but the 
court had decided differently. The court could, 
if it thought it wise, vary its decision, but, if it 
should do so in this case, it would be to the ad- 
vantage of these three firms as against their 
competitors, and the court could not see its way 
to give them any such advantage. 



Debate Instead of War 59 

After a consultation by the members of the 
court, its decision was announced by his 
Honour. 

It would be grossly unfair, he said, to their 
competitors, if these men were exempted from 
the award, and the court could see no reason for 
exempting them. The court therefore made an 
award binding these manufacturers to the same 
terms as the rest of the trade. 

A parting shot was fired by one of the de- 
fendants who said that " whatever it cost them, 
the firm would not sign an industrial agree- 
ment; they had conscientious scruples." To 
which the court blandly replied that, whether 
they had conscientious scruples or not, or signed 
or not, they would have to comply with the 
terms of the decree. 

The Mohammedans have a saying that one 
hour of justice is worth seventy years of prayer, 
and in the study of so novel and important a 
matter as compulsory arbitration, one hour of 
practical experience is worth seventy years of 
theory. 

In this instance, we see the first case which 
appears before the court continuing to appear 
before it, and we know that it will reappear. 
The masters and the men are both strongly or- 
ganised; they hold unshakable convictions; 
they even have "conscientious scruples"; they 
are not satisfied, for neither has secured what 



60 A Country Without Strikes 

he asked for, but they find it less intolerable 
to obey the award and go on than to give 
up the business. The trade is kept in continual 
agitation for six years, but how innocent the 
agitation! Instead of strikes, riots, starvation, 
bankruptcy, passion, and all the other accom- 
paniments of the Homestead method, there has 
been — debate! The total loss is a few weeks' 
time of only a dozen men. The manufacturers 
have not been ruined ; they have not had to shut 
down their works ; they have not fled the coun- 
try. The w r orkingmen have gone on working, 
buying land and building homes and paying for 
them, rearing children, and building up industry 
and the state as well as their homes. 



CHAPTER III. 

"better committees than mobs." 

One of the great sayings of Kant was that 
we should "organise the world." The com- 
pulsory arbitration of New Zealand organises 
its industrial world. Its corner-stone is its in- 
vitation to labourers and capitalists to unite 
within themselves that they may be united with 
each other. One continually sees paragraphs 
like this in the newspapers of New Zealand : 

"The iron workers of Auckland have unani- 
mously agreed to form a union under the Con- 
ciliation and Arbitration Act. to be called The 
Federated Iron Workers Union. The union 
will embrace the boiler-makers, farriers and 
general smiths." 

And often, though less frequently, one sees 
similar items announcing the organisation of 
the employers. At the last accounts there had 
been one hundred and forty trade-unions and 
unions of employers formed to take advantage 

61 



62 A Country Without Strikes 

of the Compulsory Arbitration law. More are 
coming into line. 

Compulsory arbitration proceeds on the 
teaching of experience that in labour troubles it 
is better to have committees than mobs to deal 
with, even mobs of one. Of all mobs there 
have never been any more dangerous than an 
individual beside himself with passion and 
greed, defying all laws of God and man that he 
may have his own way. 

Everything that can be done by the New Zea- 
land law to encourage these organisations is 
done. Manufacturers stay outside the organi- 
sation of their associates in the hope of escaping 
arbitration, only to find themselves as easily 
brought before the bar as the others. Organi- 
sations of workingmen which are not registered 
under this law cannot hold land for their collect- 
ive purposes and cannot sue defaulting members. 
Of course they cannot vote for members of the 
Boards of Conciliation and Courts of Arbitra- 
tion, and yet, when any disturbance arises in 
their trade, they find themselves brought before 
these boards and put under the same terms of 
employment as their fellows who have regis- 
tered. These are powerful inducements for or- 
ganisation and registration both by employers 
and workingmen, and there are others. 

There is not a detail of any grievance a work- 



Sure of a Hearing 63 

ingman may have which cannot be brought out 
before the arbitrators and the public if he is a 
member of a registered trade-union. For work- 
ingmen so organised there is no more "refusal 
to receive committees/' no more insistence upon 
"dealing with individuals/' no more talk from 
the co-working capitalists to them of "my busi- 
ness." 

When the member of the registered trade- 
union asks to be given some of the profits, there 
is no more putting him off with sweeping state- 
ments that, "The business would not stand any 
increase in wages/' statements which elsewhere 
have to be accepted because there are no means 
of either challenging them or verifying them. 

Loose allegations of that kind are not safe 
before the Court of Arbitration, for it can com- 
pel the production of books and papers and the 
attendance of witnesses to make them good. 
Public opinion in a dispute where a registered 
union of labour or capital is concerned, does not 
have to get its information from one-sided 
newspaper accounts of the grievances of either 
employers or employes. 

From the first, through all its decisions, the 
Arbitration Court has given trade-unionists, 
wherever possible, the right to be employed until 
they have all obtained work, before it permits 
the employment of non-unionists. Various rea- 



64 A Country Without Strikes 

sons have at different times been given by the 
court to sustain this policy. Besides the rea- 
sons already mentioned, found in the wording 
of the title of the law and in the custom of the 
trade, the courts have held that "the advantages 
which were procured by unions for their mem- 
bers were obtained at some expense, and there- 
fore it was but right, provided entrance to the 
union was not prohibited, that preference should 
be given to unionists, and if non-unionists 
would not pay the small fee and contributions 
to entitle them to the advantages, they had no- 
thing to complain of." 

In the iron moulders case the court expressed 
the opinion that both masters and men benefited 
by the existence of the unions; that it was bet- 
ter for all parties to deal with bodies than with 
individuals. 

It is a curious phenomenon of antipodal pub- 
lic opinion that America is being swept by waves 
of opposition on one side of society to trade- 
unions and of opposition on the other side to 
unions of capitalists, while in New Zealand the 
people and the government favour the fullest or- 
ganisation of both. 

The first judge of the Arbitration Court, 
though a man of the highest character and un- 
questioned impartiality, still was so thoroughly 
identified socially with those who are not ex- 



The Tory Judge 6$ 

pected to have much sympathy with the working 
classes, that the trade-unionists felt no little ap- 
prehension as to what was to be expected of his 
interpretation of the law. But it was he who 
initiated this policy of preference, and estab- 
lished it so firmly that it has never been de- 
parted from. Though he was, in fact, what 
some called a "Tory" judge, and was feared 
correspondingly by workingmen, he decided 
nine times out of ten in favour of the men ; not, 
he said, because they were workingmen, but be- 
cause they had the right of the case. 

But, though the Court of Arbitration gives a 
preference to trade-unionists when it thinks that 
that is called for, it does not hesitate to withhold 
it when the circumstances seem to make that the 
proper course to pursue. 

In a dispute between a number of gold mining 
companies w T hose employes were not well or- 
ganised, the court only directed that "each of 
the companies shall not discriminate against 
members of the union, and shall not, either di- 
rectly or indirectly, do anything with a view to 
injuring the union." 

And upon trade-unionists it laid the injunc- 
tion, "Members of the union shall work in har- 
mony with non-union men." 

In another case where the Court of Arbitra- 
tion did not find itself called upon to give the 



66 A Country Without Strikes 

preference in employment to trade-unionists, it 
still recommended that the steamship owners be- 
fore the court should allow union officials to go 
on board their vessels and consult with seamen 
at reasonable times. But the court stated that 
it did not intend that its recommendation 
should have the force of law, as the court did 
not consider that it had power to give a person 
liberty to enter upon a steamship or other prop- 
erty against the will of the owner. 

In another case, the court allowed the com- 
pany the option of employing non-union men, 
but specified that there was to be no preference 
in their favour. 

In a case before the Conciliation Board in- 
volving the Bakers Union of Dunedin, the chair- 
man of the board said that the ruling of the Ar- 
bitration Court was understood to be that, 
except under special circumstances, union men 
shall get preference of employment. This shows 
it to be the practice of the court to throw the 
burden upon the employer of bringing forward 
evidence to prove that in his case there were 
"special circumstances' ' militating against such 
a preference. 

The act and its administration by the court for- 
tifies the position of trade-unionists by allowing 
them to bring non-unionists in their trade before 
the court. They can summon the employers of 



The Benefit to Employers 6y 

these non-unionists, and by putting them under 
the same conditions as other employers of trade- 
unionists, protect themselves from being under- 
cut by their unorganised associates. 

Employers cannot escape the obligation to 
employ union men on union terms by discharg- 
ing their union hands and replacing them by 
non-unionists, for the court has decided that in 
such cases it still has jurisdiction. 

This is one of the features of the act which 
has won the most favour with all sides, most of 
all with employers, for it prevents them from 
being ruined by the competitor who cuts wages 
in order to cut prices. 

Though giving a preference to unionists, the 
court is careful to protect non-unionists who 
are at work. Such a sentence as this occurs 
frequently in the decisions of the court : 

"This is not to interfere with the existing en- 
gagements of non-members, whose present em- 
ployers may retain them in the same or other 
positions." 

No one can read the decisions of the court and 
detect the slightest trace of anything like bias 
for or against either labour or capital. 

The court has taken some severe "falls" out 
of trade-unions which have asked for preference 
of employment for their members. 

In a case between the Wellington Seamen's 



68 A Country Without Strikes 

Union and the shipowners, the judge entirely 
refused to make the ruling which was asked by 
the seamen, that they should have the preference 
in employment. The judge pointed out that the 
union did not dispute the fact that the ship- 
owners had faithfully abided by the previous 
ruling of the court that they should not in any 
way interfere with union men as such, or with 
the unions. That in itself, he said, was a very 
strong reason why matters should be left as they 
were, but he pointed out that there were other 
reasons to be taken into account. 

The management and navigation of ships, he 
said, stand, in many respects, on quite a differ- 
ent footing from the management of factories 
or other ordinary businesses. Above all things, 
it is necessary to have discipline on shipboard. 
Those who follow a seafaring life must, to a 
certain extent, recognise that, like soldiers and 
men-of-war's-men, they must give up their 
rights of individual action for the public benefit. 
Every order given by an officer must be unhesi- 
tatingly obeyed, whether reasonable or unrea- 
sonable, otherwise the lives and property of the 
public would be in danger. 

One of the facts in this case which had been 
brought out was that the company before the 
court was on friendly terms with the seamen's 
union of another city, Dunedin, and to compel a 



Judges and Business 69 

shipowner whose vessel plied between these two 
ports to give preference to the Wellington sea- 
men, the court pointed out might cause very un- 
pleasant and even dangerous complications. 

Had a strong case been made out, he said, he 
might have had to try to get over it, but no such 
case has been made out. It had been urged that, 
if this union did not secure preference for its 
members, some of them, who were individually 
selfish, might leave it, thinking they were not 
getting the value for their money. 

But the court held that that was no reason 
whatever for giving a preference, and added his 
hope and belief that members of the union 
would be more manly, more far-seeing than they 
had been described to be in the presentation of 
this argument. 

This award gave the seamen a few conces- 
sions and fixed the conditions of employment 
for both sides until August, 1901. 

Another case in which a trade-union asking 
preference was handled severely by the court, 
was that of the engineers of Christchurch, and 
it is worth giving in some detail, as it brings 
into clear view some interesting aspects of the 
operation of compulsory arbitration, and illus- 
trates vividly the ability of judges, "who know 
nothing of business/' to see the practical points 
of a complicated matter. 



70 A Country Without Strikes 

The court refused the engineers of Christ- 
church preference in employment, and empha- 
sised its refusal by the unusual course of adding 
to its award a special memorandum, giving its 
reasons at great length to the trade and the 
public. 

It almost seems as if the court desired to 
make it conspicuous that it had no leanings to- 
ward the side of labour, though it was so fre- 
quently deciding in its favour against capital. 

How far is this union, the court asked, "really 
representative of the great body of men em- 
ployed in the trade affected ?" 

Its analysis of the figures of membership 
showed that "the union demand is the demand 
of seventeen or eighteen men out of one hun- 
dred and fifty-one, to enforce their views upon 
the whole body." 

The number of men indirectly concerned was 
very large, not less than one thousand six hun- 
dred and thirty, according to the government 
returns. The court declared that because it 
was so small a minority, and for other reasons 
which it gave, it was compelled to the con- 
clusion that the demand of the union was in- 
imical to the interests of the majority of the 
workingmen. 

Other claims made by the union were handled 
with equal severity. They asked that the hours 



Decisions Against the Men 71 

be limited to forty-four a week. This was re- 
fused, as there was no evidence that such a 
change was wanted by any considerable num- 
ber of the men. 

The union asked that the maximum rates of 
wages which skilled workingmen were earning 
be made "the minimum wage," or the wage of 
the average worker. The effect of this would 
be, the judge said, "to throw out of employment 
a large body of steady and deserving men who 
are not sufficiently skilled to command the 
highest wage." The court said: 

"It was not disputed on the part of the union 
that, if the advance demanded were conceded, 
numbers of men who were now earning a decent 
livelihood must necessarily quit their present 
employment, and the only answer to the ques- 
tion as to what was to become of such men was 
a suggestion that they should go 'bushwhack- 
ing/ a suggestion which appears to me to im- 
ply not only very imperfect knowledge as to 
what was involved in bushwhacking, but a very 
imperfect conception of the rights of fellow- 
workmen." 

Another reason for not granting these and 
other claims was that the employers would be 
forced to raise the prices of their goods, such as 
agricultural machinery, and this they could not 
afford to do for "they were working in compe- 



J2 A Country Without Strikes 

tition not only with each other, but with other 
similar establishments in other centres in the 
colony, and not only with these but also in com- 
petition with importers. The concession of 
these demands would result in the speedy ex- 
tinction of the agricultural implement manufac- 
turing trade/' 

The Court of Arbitration has often limited 
the number of apprentices at the request of the 
unions, but in this case it would not do so. 

"The main grounds," the court said, "urged 
in support of this claim are, first, that the trade 
will become over-manned unless the number of 
apprentices is limited ; and, second, that the ap- 
prentices are not so well taught if their number 
exceed those suggested." 

But in reply to this the court pointed out that, 
"up to the present time, though the number of 
apprentices has not been limited, the trade has 
not become over-manned. The reason is that 
engineers are required in many other walks of 
life besides engineer shops, such as marine en- 
gineers, refrigerating engineers, both at sea and 
on shore, etc. Engineers are also required in 
all large factories where machinery is used. 
The engineering shops are necessarily the train- 
ing grounds for all these engineers, and the re- 
sult has been that all the lads who have served 
their apprenticeship in Christchurch and have 



Keeping the Door Open 73 

learned their trade, have had no difficulty in 
finding employment." 

The second point, that apprentices are not 
well taught, if there is a large number of them, 
the court found to fail equally with the other. 

"It has been proved beyond a doubt," it said, 
"that engineers trained in Christchurch shops 
have been able to hold their own with engi- 
neers trained in Great Britain and elsewhere, 
and that many of them have done remarkably 
well." 

"It would require very special grounds, in 
my opinion," continued the judge, "to justify an 
award which would have the effect of closing 
the door to an employment which has so many 
outlets, and which is justly popular with the 
youth of the colony." 

He then went on to point out a special ground 
why a claim to limit the number of engineering 
apprentices should be more closely scrutinised in 
Christchurch than elsewhere in the colony. 

"There is, it seems, in Christchurch a school 
of engineering attended by some ninety stu- 
dents, all of whom require to have a practical 
knowledge of their trade, and this they can only 
acquire in the engineering shops in Christ- 
church. It is not contested that this school does 
good work, and that it is a highly desirable in- 
stitution, yet the result of conceding the union 



74 A Country Without Strikes 

demand in the matter would be to debar many 
of the students from acquiring the practical 
knowledge which is essential to them." 

In the truly practical spirit of our Anglo- 
Saxon law, the judge took special pains to show 
that in this ruling he was considering only the 
actual and special circumstances of the case be- 
fore him, and was not establishing precedents 
which could be indiscriminately applied. 

"I desire to guard myself," he said, "from 
seeming to lay down any rules as to when it 
may be proper to give such a privilege to the 
members of the union, because I think that each 
case must stand upon its own merits, and the 
claim must in every case be carefully scrutin- 
ised." 

The Honourable John Rigg, one of the rep- 
resentatives of labour in the Upper House of the 
New Zealand Parliament, in discussing this 
decision, said: 

"Those, I consider, are very good grounds 
for the decision, and we see here the absolute 
impartiality with which the disputes have been 
determined." 

This decision indicated no change of heart in 
the Court of Arbitration and no apostasy to its 
principle, as to the importance of trade-unions 
nor their rights to a preference of employment 
when the circumstances called for it. 



Reinstating the Discharged j$ 

The court continued after this decision as be- 
fore to give preference to trade-unions. This 
was awarded in fact by the Board of Concilia- 
tion and the Court of Arbitration to all the 
trade-unions in the same town of Christchurch, 
in all the disputes which have come up since, and 
there have been a number of them — the printers, 
bakers, butchers, cooks, tinsmiths, sheet-iron 
workers, tailors, grocers, furniture makers. 

How far the court was from any bias against 
trade-unionism is shown in the case of a coal- 
mining company w T hich had discharged three 
men because they were members of an industrial 
union — the president, the secretary, and the son 
of the secretary. Their union called the com- 
pany to account and the case was heard by the 
Court of Arbitration. The court awarded that 
the company should pay by way of damages to 
the union $283, which was the wages the men 
had lost, and should also pay the costs, amount- 
ing to $57. 

The court ordered the reinstatement of the 
men discharged for their unionism : 

"The employers, if so requested by any of 
them (the discharged men) within one week 
from the making of this award, shall take them 
into their service in the same capacities they 
occupied at the time of their dismissal. " 

The Arbitration Court has gone so far as to 



j6 A Country Without Strikes 

recommend men who were not organised to 
form unions. 

Some range-makers wanted to be included in 
an award in a dispute affecting some tinsmiths 
and sheet-metal workers. In giving his de- 
cision, the judge said that the court had come 
to the conclusion that the range-makers could 
not come under the award. But at the same 
time, he continued, there was no reason why 
these men should not form a union of their 
own, and then, if they had a grievance they 
could apply to the court to fix their wages. 

Women workers were intended by Mr. 
Reeves and Parliament to be given all the bene- 
fits of the act, but they did not seem to consider 
themselves covered by its language. The act 
said "workmen," and the new spirit of inde- 
pendence which marks the sex in our century, 
apparently prompted them to ignore the act be- 
cause it did not specially mention them. 

To meet this difficulty it was necessary to 
amend the bill the year after its passage. In 
offering this amendment, the Minister of La- 
bour, Mr. Reeves, said that it had been found 
impossible to persuade the women that "work- 
men" included work- women. They were under 
the impression that they were debarred from 
registering under the act because of the exclu- 
sive use of this masculine word. He therefore 



Coaxing Women to Arbitrate yj 

proposed to substitute for "workmen" the word 
"workers." With this concession to the dignity 
of their sex, the women workers have since 
registered freely, and have obtained important 
advantages, but especially in the clothing trade 
as will be shown. 

"There is much virtue," says Shakespeare, "in 
your 'if/ ' There is much virtue in New Zea- 
land in "workman." This word is legally de- 
fined in the land regulations of the colony as 
meaning any man or woman over twenty-one, 
"who is engaged in any form of manual, cleri- 
cal or other work for hire or reward," and is not 
worth more than $750. 

This word is a straw which would suggest 
at once to any one knowing the New Zealand 
character, that others than those ordinarily 
known as artisans or manual w r orkers would be 
likely to claim for themselves from the Arbitra- 
tion Law the benefits of what it gives. 

This has been the case. 

In my morning paper at Christchurch, I read 
one day : 

"The employes in the grocery trade have re- 
cently formed an industrial union, and during 
the past fortnight have submitted certain con- 
ditions tcr the employers. As, however, the 
great body of them simply ignore the requests 
of the union, some forty employers have been 



7$ A Country Without Strikes 

incited to appear before the Board of Concilia- 
tion of Thursday next, at 2 p. m." 

All classes of employes in the groceries had 
joined in the organisation — clerks, bookkeepers, 
order collectors, head draymen and other dray- 
men. 

The decision of the Conciliation Board was in 
favour of the men on almost all points. The 
board recommended that the minimum or aver- 
age wage for these men should be £2 5s. 
($11.25) a week. It provided that those who 
were unable to earn the minimum could be still 
employed at lesser wages to be approved, if 
necessary, by the Conciliation Board. 

The award provided for extra pay for over- 
time at the rate of one shilling (twenty-five 
cents) an hour, and all time worked on holidays 
was to be classed as overtime. 

The award also gave the members of the Can- 
terbury Grocers' Union "preference of employ- 
ment over non-members/' with the usual 
stipulation, "provided that the members of the 
union are equally qualified with non-members 
to perform the particular work required to be 
done, and are ready and willing to undertake it." 

The employers were required to give the sec- 
retary of the union twenty-four hours' notice 
when they wanted additional clerks before they 
were allowed to engage any non-union men. 



Clerks Ruled Out 79 

But the representative of the employers when 
this award was made announced that the gro- 
cers would not accept it, and would compel their 
men to appeal to the Arbitration Court. There 
the point would be pressed by the employers 
that the grocery trade was not an "industry," 
and the clerks' union could not therefore be 
registered under the Arbitration Act. In this 
position the employers claimed they were for- 
tified by the best legal advice obtainable. 

They had made this point before the Board of 
Conciliation, but the board was unanimous in 
its opinion that the clerks were properly before 
the court, and that the case must proceed. If 
the action of the Board of Conciliation had been 
sustained by the appeal, and the objections of 
the employers overruled, other clerks and em- 
ployes of mercantile houses, and even of finan- 
cial concerns, would have organised and claimed 
the protection of the act, for their wages and 
terms of employment. The Arbitration Court, 
however, reversed the decision of the Board of 
Conciliation, and held that an issue between the 
grocers and their assistants was not an "indus- 
trial dispute" within the meaning of the act. 
But it suggested that the union could ask the 
Supreme Court for a mandamus to the Arbitra- 
tion Court to hear the case. 

One of the leading papers of Christchurch 



80 A Country Without Strikes 

in discussing this case said that, if the Arbitra- 
tion Court did not sustain the right of the 
grocery clerks to take advantage of the act, the 
legislature would certainly amend it in their 
favour. In one way or the other, either by an 
interpretation by the Court of Arbitration which 
will admit clerks, etc., or by amendment of the 
law, we may look to see drug clerks, grocery 
employes, in fact, all employes, including, very 
likely, domestic workers in the family and farm 
labourers, invited to enlist in the army of non- 
combatants. They are all workmen in the sense 
which has been given that word officially by the 
New Zealand government in its land legislation. 

Public policy will see the same reasons for 
this universal inclusion of all men and women 
who receive hire as for the inclusion of one 
class. The Compulsory Arbitration law will 
then become a truly democratic measure, giving 
its helping hand to all. 

It took a year for the grocers' assistants to 
get their case decided. This delay reveals one 
of the practical defects of the operation of the 
law. The President of the Arbitration Court 
having other courts to sit in is slow in getting 
around the colony, and there was consequently 
for many months no session of the court in 
Christchurch. The awards of the Conciliation 
Board not being enforceable, its award in their 



The Defect in Procedure 81 

favour had for that length of time been of no 
practical value to the clerks. The government 
has promised to remedy this difficulty by in- 
creasing the judicial force of the Arbitration 
Court. 

By its advance to include women as well as 
men, we see the New Zealand Arbitration Law 
grounding itself more firmly, step by step, in 
the life of the people, aggrandising itself as a 
good institution will do, constantly gaining a 
larger place and binding the citizens to itself 
more and more. During these six years of ex- 
istence it has grown every day more important. 

There is no right without its duty. With 
this preference of employment which it gives 
trade-unionists, the Court of Arbitration lays 
upon them corresponding obligations. A para- 
graph in the decision in favour of preference for 
employment for the painters of Christchurch 
shows this. 

"The union," the court says, "is to keep in a 
convenient place, within one mile from the chief 
post-office in Christchurch, a book of trade- 
unionists out of employment, together with their 
qualifications — a note to be made when any of 
the workmen obtain employment. The execu- 
tive of the union is to use their best endeavours 
to verify all entries, and shall be answerable as 
for a breach of this award in case any entry 



82 A Country Without Strikes 

therein shall be wilfully false of their knowl- 
edge, or in case they shall not have used reason- 
able endeavours to verify the same. The book 
is to be open between 8 a.m. and 5 p. m. to all 
employers. In case of the failure of the union 
accurately to keep such book, the employers 
shall be at liberty to employ other than members 
of the union. Notice by advertisement in the 
Christchurch morning papers is to be given of 
the place where such book is to be kept." 

Another thing the court demands of the 
trade-unions in return for this preference of em- 
ployment given them, is that they shall not be 
monopolies; they must be inclusive not ex- 
clusive. 

In a case brought by some iron moulders, the 
judge, in granting the union preference in em- 
ployment, said that, at the same time it was 
opposed to granting anything which tended to 
make the union a close corporation. The court 
had, therefore, closely examined the rules of the 
union to see whether there was any provision 
against the admission of men of sober habits 
and good character, and it added the stipulation 
that before the trade-unions could be given a 
preference for their members, they must not 
prohibit the admission of such men. 

One reason for the very severe treatment 
given the Christchurch engineers already spoken 
of, was that the judge found that there were a 



No Labour Monopoly 83 

large number of men employed in the district 
who were "not only debarred from becoming 
members of the union under its rules, but would, 
under the scheme proposed by the union, be de- 
barred from working in the trades in which they 
are at present employed." 

"Unions which sought this advantage/' the 
judge intimated, "must be practically open to 
every person employed in the trade who desires 
to join." 

This ruling of the court is in line with the 
general policy of the trade-unions, which, unlike 
other monopolies, usually do their best to in- 
crease the number of monopolists. But this 
court has made it 'easier for trade-unionists in 
New Zealand to live up to it than elsewhere by 
the establishment of the "minimum wage." 

In every dispute the court fixes this minimum 
or average wage. Its decisions carefully pro- 
vide for superior, average, and inferior men. 
No one can be employed for less than the aver- 
age, except, as has been already explained, men 
not competent to earn the average, and the rate 
paid them must, if questioned, be sanctioned by 
the local Board of Conciliation. 

It is no matter to the trade-union, then, how 
many members it admits; there is no danger 
that the overcrowding will lead to lower wages, 
for the wages cannot be lowered. 

The object of the Arbitration law was to 



84 A Country Without Strikes 

prevent strikes. These rulings of the Court of 
Arbitration make the institution also a powerful 
instrument in the mitigation of competition be- 
tween workingmen, and in the maintenance of 
higher wages and a better standard of life. 

On the other side the law ameliorates com- 
petition among the capitalists by preventing 
them from cutting wages in order to cut prices. 

Not being allowed counsel in the Arbitration 
Court puts the workingmen on their mettle and 
will have a mighty educational influence upon 
them. As the visitor sees the presiding judge 
disciplining the representatives of the employers 
and the men, he realises that this court is a 
school for "grown-ups." The judge, despite 
himself, cannot sometimes help showing an irri- 
tation which obviously has need of all the con- 
solation he can get from the reflection that his 
school is, perhaps, the most important one in 
the world. 

In one of the cases I attended, the judge had 
frequent occasion to caution the representative 
of a union on his conduct of the evidence, and to 
advise him as to what he should not do. Finally, 
his Honour, in a state bordering on despair, ex- 
claimed : 

"It appears to me that so far as the proceed- 
ings of this court are concerned, the legal pro- 
fession will have to be admitted. You," he said, 



A School for Grown-ups 85 

to the union's advocate, "are not conducting the 
proceedings in an intelligible manner, and all I 
can get is inference." 

The educational influence of the court extends 
to other matters than the modes of arguing the 
case and handling evidence. 

At a meeting of the Arbitration Court when 
a witness was being examined as to his average 
earnings, his Honour said it was the duty of all 
trade-unionists to keep a proper account. If 
they did not want to do this for themselves, they 
should do it in the interests of their union and 
their associates. 

And on the same day an employer, called by 
the association of master-painters, in giving 
his evidence about wages and other matters, 
frequently used the phrase "I think." The judge 
interrupted him to say that an employer keep- 
ing books should "know," not "think," and that 
in such matters as these, he could take suppo- 
sitions only for what they were worth. 

Mr. Reeves, in first presenting his bill, laid 
stress on the great service that would be ren- 
dered the community in the simple fact that it 
would keep industrial disputes free from passion. 

An instance of this occurred on the first day 
of the session of the court at which I was present 
at Christchurch. 

One of the advocates was putting questions 



86 A Country Without Strikes 

in a style which certainly could not be consid- 
ered polite, but which there would have been 
none to repress in an old-time conference be- 
tween masters and men. He was corrected by 
the judge, who said : 

"I cannot allow insulting language or insult- 
ing questions to be used in this court. The pro- 
ceedings must be conducted with the same 
decorum as if I were in the Supreme Court, and 
any one acting to the contrary will be excluded 
from participating in the proceedings." 

In the presence of the presiding judge, a per- 
son so important as the Judge of the Supreme 
Court, and a man who holds their destiny in his 
hands, the contestants must behave themselves. 
Every student of his own and other people's 
human nature knows how steadying a part it 
plays in keeping his temper, to be obliged to 
look and act as if he were keeping it. 

Discussions between workingmen and their 
employers, carried on without such restraining 
influences as are found in the Arbitration Court, 
often ripen into most devastating disputes from 
the mere license given to an angry tongue. 

The point has been made that the arbitration 
act as administered gives an unfair advantage 
to the trade-unionists, and that this advantage 
goes to a very small minority, since only a slight 
proportion of the workingmen in New Zealand, 
as in Great Britain and the United States, are 



Agreements to Strike 87 

organised. Even in Great Britain, the home 
of trade-unionism, only about one sixth of the 
men are enrolled. 

To this extent the act does accentuate an in- 
equality. But as any seven men can form a 
union in the trade, they need not endure this 
discrimination a day longer than they them- 
selves wish to. 

The only circumstances which would make it 
possible that any industrial dispute in New Zea- 
land should escape arbitration, would be the 
entire absence of any organisation, either 
among the masters or the men. 

If such a thing were conceivable as an agree- 
ment between the employers and the men not to 
invoke the courts, but to go on striking and 
locking out at their own sweet will, and should 
agree for that purpose to refrain on both sides 
from organisation, we should certainly have a 
case, but the only case in which there could be 
no arbitration. 

The state has no independent power of its 
own to investigate labour troubles, nor to move 
to settle them of its own motion. 

The Minister of Labour, Mr. Reeves, in 
offering his bill, declared himself to be in favour 
of such initiative, but thought that the commu- 
nity was not yet ripe to entrust the government 
with such power. 

The New Zealand law is so far altogether 



88 A Country Without Strikes 

individualistic. Persons can compel arbitra- 
tion, but the people cannot. The protection of 
the public interests is for the present then en- 
trusted to the initiative of the aggrieved indi- 
vidual, under the certainty that the class feeling 
between labour and capital is strong enough to 
insure action. Trusts like those now coming 
into favour in England, such as that of the bed- 
stead makers of Birmingham, in which the mas- 
ters and the men have united to fleece the public, 
would not be very promising subjects for com- 
pulsory arbitration. 

The organisation of capital and labour both 
could have no greater stimulant than compul- 
sory arbitration, and for the trade-unions it has 
this special attraction: Beyond the collective 
workingman we can see the collective capitalist 
in the trade-unions saving the funds they now 
waste in strikes for making contracts on their 
own account, and for co-operative production, 
house building, land owning and banking. 

By a late decision, January, 1900, the court 
rules that if preference of employment is given 
trade-unionists they, on their side, must prefer 
employers who are organised in associations 
rather than outsiders. The rule must work 
both ways. If organised labour asks prefer- 
ence, it must accord organised capital the same 
advantage. 



CHAPTER IV. 

A NEW SONG OF THE SHIRT. 

In replying to a gibe from the London 
Times, "that the act does not inspire others 
with the satisfaction with which it is contem- 
plated by its author/' Mr. Reeves wrote, in 
1898: 

"As for my 'satisfaction/ I am happy that 
the act has got to work and has done good ser- 
vice during three years of use; especially am I 
glad that it has helped the women workers.'' 

There is no chapter of the operation of this 
new institution which has a more fascinating 
social interest than that which tells how it has 
helped the sewing women of New Zealand out 
of the sweatshops, and, quite as important, how 
it keeps them out. 

The clothing trade in all countries is a 
hatchery for the foulest evils that haunt modern 
industry. Its workers are largely women and 

89 



90 A Country Without Strikes 

children, the most helpless of all. Many of 
them, supported at home, seek the occupation to 
get a little something to add to the family re- 
sources, and for pin money. They drag down 
the wages — the cost of production — of those 
who must live on what they make. 

No labour struggles are more deeply distress- 
ing to the public than the convulsive efforts 
which are made every now and then, so ineffec- 
tually, by the working girls and working women 
of these trades, to escape from their starvation 
wages and degrading conditions of employment. 

The conscience of the New Zealand public 
was swept about ten years ago by one of those 
waves of feeling which periodically arouses our 
people as well to a feverish interest and spas- 
modic attempts to find a remedy. 

At both ends of the colony, in Auckland and 
Wellington in the north, and in Dunedin and 
other cities in the south, the workers, aided by 
clergymen and other well-known citizens, and 
the newspapers, began to stir to put an end to 
what was felt to be as much a danger as a 
scandal. 

In Dunedin, the agitation began with the 
shirt-makers w T ho were miserably sweated. 
"Dunedin," as one of its senators said to me in 
describing this movement, "is a small town. 
Everybody knows everybody else. It was well- 



Protection from Competitors 91 

known that the manufacturers had reduced 
wages below the living point. It had become a 
public scandal. There was no difficulty in get- 
ting the parsons and the newspaper men to take 
up the crusade against the sweatshops. The 
newspapers and the clergymen took the lead. ,, 

Now, Miss Whitehorn, the Secretary of the 
Tailoresses Union, assured me, "Practically all 
the Dunedin tailoresses are organised/' 

In this work, she said, "The shirt-makers and 
the other working women had been assisted by 
almost all of the employers — all but six or seven 
— who helped them to organise. 

"One of the most important uses of the Com- 
pulsory Arbitration Law, these manufacturers 
are finding," she continued, "is to give induce- 
ments to the workers to organise, and to bring the 
minority of the masters into line. It is used in 
such cases not against the employers as a whole, 
but against those of them who are irreconcil- 
able. The majority of the manufacturers as 
well as the master tailors, those who run fac- 
tories and those who have shops, favoured the 
organisation, of their employes into trade- 
unions, and even allowed the walking delegates 
of the union to visit the shops and persuade the 
workers to 'join the unions. 

"The shirt-makers and other factory clothing 
workers of the principal towns in the South Isl- 



92 A Country Without Strikes 

and, Dunedin, Christchurch and Wellington, 
are, in consequence of this movement and the 
help of their employers, now working by a 'log' 
— a schedule of prices and conditions arranged at 
a voluntary conference in Wellington, in No- 
vember, 1897, to run a year, afterwards re- 
newed for six months. 

"The employers met us in this conference in 
the best spirit. They could not have been more 
sociable. They took tea with us and did every- 
thing they could to make us feel that they de- 
sired to help us better our condition. 

"This conference was very harmonious. The 
masters had to make some concessions and we 
had to make some. When this expires in May ; 
1899, there will probably be a great struggle on 
account of the situation in Auckland. The 
workers there are miserably paid. We have 
spent £300 ($1500) in the effort to organise 
the shirt-makers and tailoresses of Auckland. 
We have sent some of our best leaders there. 
We sent some girls who were good organisers 
privately to work in the Auckland factories to 
leaven the mass, but it was of no use. There 
seems to be a most complete apathy among the 
workingmen and women there. There is, too, 
some trade jealousy, for the Auckland people 
are afraid they may lose some of their busi- 
ness, as the character of the work done in the 



Failure of Conciliation 93 

South Island is much superior to theirs. The 
Dunedin manufacturers would have a genuine 
grievance/' this working woman said, "if asked 
to pay higher wages than are paid by the Auck- 
land manufacturers, who are their competitors." 

We shall see later how these fears that the 
poor organisation of the workers of Auckland 
might threaten the welfare of the workers else- 
where, were justified. On account of the dis- 
organised condition of the Auckland operatives 
and the intractability of some of the Auckland 
employers the private peace w T hich had been ar- 
ranged in the shirt-making and other factory 
and clothing industries by voluntary effort 
broke down, when the agreement ran out in 
May, 1899, as the Secretary of the Dunedin 
tailoresses had apprehended. 

It was the factory workers who were so suc- 
cessful in Dunedin and Christchurch and Well- 
ington in arranging an agreement until May, 
1899. 

Whether because their conditions of employ- 
ment were not so deplorable, or whether for 
some other reason they did not receive the same 
public support, the girls and women employed 
in the tailor shops of Dunedin and Wellington, 
though of a higher class industrially, did not 
succeed in holding their ground. 

While their sisters, the shirt-makers, occupy- 



94 A Country Without Strikes 

ing a lower place in the trade, were enjoying 
peace, under the terms of their private concili- 
ation, the tailoresses of the shops w T ere com- 
pelled to go to the Conciliation Board in April, 
1898, in Wellington, and in March, 1899, m 
Dunedin. 

The board, in making its award, took occa- 
sion to note that the difficulties it had en- 
countered in the case, which had been very 
serious, had arisen not at all "from any ill feel- 
ing or want of forbearance on either side — be- 
cause the manner in which the dispute had been 
conducted was most praiseworthy" — but from 
technical obstacles peculiar to the trade. 

To overcome this, they had made an adjourn- 
ment for a fortnight and had had an expert 
from each side to assist them. All these efforts, 
however, "to get the parties closer to one an- 
other" failed. 

As the board did not award the Wellington 
tailoresses the wages they felt they ought to 
have, their union decided to refuse to accept the 
award of the Conciliation Board, and the matter 
went before the Court of Arbitration. 

The court, before undertaking to make a de- 
cision of its own on the question, adjourned as 
the Conciliation Board had done, to see if a pri- 
vate arrangement could not be made between 
the parties. This proved impossible, and, after 



Private Arbitration Fails 95 

hearing evidence from both sides, the court 
made its award. 

In this it practically adopted the recommen- 
dations of the Conciliation Board. The mini- 
mum wage, for instance, for coat-makers was 
put at £1 1 os. ($7.50), the figures fixed by the 
Conciliation Board; not so much as the work- 
ing women had asked for, £1 17s. 6d. ($9.37), 
but more than the masters had been willing to 
concede £1 5s. ($6.25). 

The Arbitration Court also reaffirmed the 
preference of employment for members of the 
union, which had been strongly opposed by the 
master tailors and, to put an end to sweating, 
stipulated that all work must be done at the shop 
of the employer. 

This award settled the conditions of the trade 
from September, 1898, to September, 1900. As 
a result of this arbitration, Miss Whitehorn said, 
"We are a lot better off than we were." 

In Dunedin, as in Wellington, the tailoresses 
employed in the merchant tailors' shops were 
compelled to go to the Court of Arbitration, 
while the shirt-makers were happily at peace as 
the result of their private negotiations with their 
employers. 

The Dunedin tailoresses were before the Court 
of Arbitration while I was in Dunedin. Their 
representative, in his address to the court, gave 



96 A Country Without Strikes 

an account of the past efforts of employers and 
employes to harmonise the trade, and of the new 
conditions which had broken down their private 
peace. The agreement which was made after 
1892, between the employers and employed had 
lasted, he said, for some years, a fact which 
showed the good feeling that existed, but things 
had now changed. 

A large number of new firms had come in, 
new methods of business had been introduced, 
many of the old abuses prevalent before the in- 
ception of the union and its successful negoti- 
ation with the masters, such as sweating, low 
wages and long hours were beginning to make 
themselves felt again. 

Both the members of the union and many of 
the more important employers had come to the 
joint conclusion that, in the interest of both of 
them and of the public, a new settlement should 
be made, otherwise things would revert to the 
unfortunate condition of ten years ago. 

In pursuance of this joint understanding, the 
representatives of the union and of their em- 
ployers, the Master Tailors' Association, spent 
twelve months in holding meetings and con- 
ferring. As a result of these combined efforts, 
they had succeeded in preparing another "log." 
Out of forty-nine employers in Dunedin, forty- 
two had signed this "log" as satisfactory to 
them. There were only seven who stood out. 



An Unexpected By-Product 97 

An appeal was made to the Conciliation 
Board. This decided in favour of the agree- 
ment made by the union and the forty-two em- 
ployers, but the other seven remained obdurate, 
and the Court of Arbitration had to be called 
upon to make the decisive award. 

One of the by-products of arbitration made its 
first appearance in this case. It indicates an un- 
expected use of arbitration, and shows the 
benefits that accrue to the community from com- 
pulsory publicity. 

Some of the seven employers who would not 
come into line in the agreement, held out, as the 
representative of the working women showed 
the court, because this agreement would put an 
end to a fraud which was being practised in 
their shops on the public. They were in the 
habit of taking orders for clothing to be made 
according to measure, by first-class workers. 
But, as a matter of fact, they sent the order to 
a factory, to be made up by factory workers at 
factory prices, instead of sending it to their own 
tailors and tailoresses. They pocketed the dif- 
ference of this fraud on their customers, or used 
the money they thus saved in cutting prices, to 
the detriment of competitors who honestly gave 
the customer what he paid for. 

The court put a summary stop to this sort of 
deception. In referring to this, the court said 
in its decision : 



98 A Country Without Strikes 

"All bespoke work — all goods made and sold 
as tailor-made ; also any order in which there is 
a garment fitted on — shall be done in the shop 
of the employer' ' — and the court ordered that it 
should be paid for at shop and not factory 
prices. 

The court drily remarked to the representa- 
tives of this irreconcilable minority of the em- 
ployers that, "They would have to come in under 
the same conditions with the other members of 
the trade, if they were going to continue in the 
tailoring business." 

This incident shows us the Compulsory Arbi- 
tration law working steadily as a force for hon- 
esty in trade. It does so because of the publicity 
ir insures. The w r orkingmen know and often re- 
sent the deceits they are compelled to perpetrate. 
These are often, as in this case, an injury to them 
as well as the consumer for they are forced 
to do inferior work at inferior prices or to see 
work they should do go to others as in this 
case. 

The open court-room of compulsory arbitra- 
tion gives them a chance to let out the "trade 
secret' ' and protect both the public and them- 
selves. Where there is an Arbitration Court, 
manufacturers will think twice before they make 
coffee with beans, sugar with glucose, or scamp 
the hidden side of their work, for their working- 



How to Bind New-comers 99 

men may some day come before the court and let 
the public into this awkward secret of "my busi- 
ness." 

The decision of the court fixed the lowest 
rate of wages to be paid to workers at £1 5s. 
($6.25) a week. It limited the number of ap- 
prentices to one to every three operatives. The 
hours were fixed at forty-five in each week. 
Overtime was to be paid for at the rate of time 
and a quarter; and in case of piece-work, there 
was to be 2d. (4 cents) an hour extra. No ma- 
chinist was to machine for more than thirteen 
w r orkers, and the employers were required to 
employ competent members of the union in pre- 
ference to non-members. 

New difficulties are, of course, continually 
arising in the application of the procedure of 
compulsory arbitration to business competitors. 

One such difficulty arose in the case of the 
arbitration between the master tailors of Well- 
ington and their employes. Two of the firms 
protested against being bound by the award, on 
the ground that, as it fixed the conditions of 
business for two years, new-comers in the trade, 
who were not subject to the award, could com- 
pete against them on unfair terms, but the court 
found a way to meet this just objection. 

It directed that these objectors should be 
bound by the agreement just as all the others in 



ioo A Country Without Strikes 

the trade were, but stipulated that the union, 
if any new-comers appeared in the trade, who 
attempted to under-cut the terms fixed in the 
decision, should "take the necessary steps to 
compel them to do so, within fourteen days after 
notice." 

"If the union fails," the decision continued, 
"to commence and carry out proceedings, or, if 
in taking such proceedings, it shall be unable to 
compel such persons or firms to conform with 
the terms," then all of the employers were to be 
released. 

In this way the court placed upon the union 
the burden of seeing that all employers, new- 
comers as well, were brought under the same 
conditions. The workingmen could easily do 
this because, under the terms of the Arbitration 
law, they can proceed against any employer. 

Justice was thereby secured to all the em- 
ployers in the trade, and the initiative, in seeing 
that this was done and their own interests pro- 
tected as well, was properly left to the trade- 
unions, which had been the prime movers in re- 
sorting to the Court of Arbitration. 

It is time now to turn to Auckland and the part 
of marplot which it played in the prosperity of 
the women who sing the Song of the Shirt, as 
the secretary of the union foretold would happen. 
The ferment in the public conscience which had 



Leading Citizens Lead 101 

done so much for the women workers of Dun- 
edin and Wellington, in 1892, began to work at 
the same time in Auckland. 

The Honourable W. T. Jennings, when the 
Auckland shirt-makers and other clothing oper- 
atives came before the Conciliation Board in 
November, 1897, made a statement of their 
efforts for many years and of the assistance 
which they had received. 

The movement in Auckland began a little 
later than that in Dunedin. How much need 
there was for it was abundantly shown by facts 
which were brought to light in 1892. The rate 
of pay was very low. Cases were discovered of 
young women who had been years at the trade 
and were fairly good workers, who received 
only 9s. ($2.25) a week. The evidence of the 
operatives showed that the average was about 
1 os. ($2.50) a week, and the hours for work 
were a good deal over ten. 

A union was formed in 1892, but the manu- 
facturers fought it by discharging the leaders, 
and, in fact, any of the operatives who could be 
found to be members. 

The knowledge of this intimidation and of 
the wretchedness out of which sprang this effort 
of the shirt-makers to organise, led many of the 
best men and women in the community to come 
to their help. A public meeting was held under 



102 A Country Without Strikes 

the auspices of the most influential citizens, and 
the then President of the Auckland Chamber of 
Commerce, in his address declared it to be the 
duty of every citizen to recognise the evils of 
under pay and intimidation, and to rise to the 
duty of seeing that the weaker section of the 
community received protection. 

Among the other citizens who assisted this 
movement were a number of employers. Many 
of them did so, said Mr. Jennings, "believing 
that it would be conducive to better trade, and 
would also tend to counteract in a marked de- 
gree the 'cutting' practices that prevailed." 

There were many conferences between the 
working girls and their employers, but after 
protracted delays, the negotiations broke down, 
and the trade reverted to the anarchy of preced- 
ing years. 

But after the Compulsory Arbitration law 
was passed, the working girls renewed their 
complaints, the union was resuscitated, and ne- 
gotiations with the manufacturers were re- 
sumed. 

After ten months hard work, a "log," or 
schedule of wages was prepared that was accept- 
able to both employers and the union. There 
were, however, five employers who refused, like 
the minority of employers in Dunedin, to concur 
in the "log," and the Auckland Tailoresses 



Competition by Sweating 103 

Union, therefore, as a last resort submitted the 
matter to the Board of Conciliation. 

In stating their case to the Board of Concilia- 
tion, their representative spoke as much in the 
name of the manufacturers who had agreed to 
the new wages as in that of their employes. 

"It is undoubtedly wrong," he said, "that 
honourable and fair-dealing manufacturers 
who are prepared to pay a fair wage to their em- 
ployes should have to compete against others 
who are working their factories at a difference 
of over thirty per cent, in the wages of their 
women workers. There has not been any spirit 
of antagonism in this matter. It is a battle 
really in behalf of those who are prepared to do 
the right thing and to keep down the extension 
of the sweating system." 

The Secretary of the Union, Mrs. Hendre, 
also addressed the court, and emphasised the 
fact that, in making this schedule of wages, they 
had been treated with consideration by many of 
the manufacturers, and that she therefore hoped 
this dispute would be amicably decided. 

She pointed out that the justice of the claims 
made by the union was proven by the fact that 
they had been conceded by a number of the 
firms. 

"We are not asking even now," she said, 
"what the southern girls are getting." 



104 A Country Without Strikes 

This co-operation of the better class of em- 
ployers with the employes was practically uni- 
versal throughout the clothing trade, and I 
found it existing in many of the other trades. 
Speaking on this subject, the Honourable John 
Rigg said in the Upper House of the New Zea- 
land Parliament: 

"The employers see that where the conditions 
of competition are on an equal basis, the com- 
petition is a better one and a healthier one, and 
fairer. They suffered more under the old state 
of affairs where it was possible for a man to 
sweat his employes, and by this means cut down 
prices to such a stage that other employers could 
not follow him. 

"I know of instances where the employers are 
working now hand-in-glove with the unions for* 
the purpose of keeping up organisation and ar- 
bitration. An agreement to that effect was 
arrived at between the Federated Tailoresses 
and the Federated Employers, representing 
Dunedin, Christchurch and Wellington, and the 
employers are not only assisting the union in 
many matters, but especially in using their in- 
fluence to get their employes to go into the 
unions." 

The tailoresses were successful in their appeal 
to the Conciliation Board, and its award seems 
to have been accepted, as no further proceedings 
appear to have been taken. 



Wages Increased 105 

This award stipulated that the manufacturers 
must find employment for all competent mem- 
bers of the trade-union before they gave work to 
those outside the union. The increase in pay 
allowed the tailoresses in Auckland averaged 
fifteen per cent. 

A great lift was given by these efforts to a 
trade which had been as depressed in New Zea- 
land as it is through the rest of the world. 

But the course of events at Auckland after 
this award expired was not so favourable. It 
justified the fears of the secretary of the Dun- 
edin tailoresses as to the effect upon her con- 
stituency of the weakness of labour in Auck- 
land. It also clearly exemplified the superiority 
of a compulsory tribunal over voluntary concili- 
ation in assuring peace. In 1899, the Auck- 
land tailoresses, coming again to a difference 
with their employers, did not go to the Court of 
Arbitration as before. After a long private 
negotiation, they and the employers agreed upon 
a "log" by themselves. 

In the report of this which appeared in the 
Auckland papers of June 2, 1899, the members 
of the union were described as jubilant because 
several important increases had been obtained. 

"As it has been accepted," the Auckland 
News said, "by all parties concerned, there will 
be no necessity to go to the Board of Concilia- 
tion." 



106 A Country Without Strikes 

But signs soon showed that the workers 
would have done much better for themselves 
and for their associates and the rest of the 
colony, if they had gone to the court instead of 
attempting to make this private settlement. For 
in it the shirt-makers and tailoresses of Auck- 
land were clearly outgeneraled by their employ- 
ers. Before the Board of Conciliation they 
had secured preference of employment for 
trade-unionists, but, in this agreement by pri- 
vate conciliation, the manufacturers bound 
themselves only "not to discriminate against 
members of the union." 

The Auckland employers were evidently 
shrewdly advised, and, it is probably safe to 
guess were acting in concert with the associated 
manufacturers of the rest of New Zealand. By 
thus getting rid of the preference to trade-union- 
ists and obliging themselves only not to discrim- 
inate against unions — a very different thing — 
they effected a breach in the defences of the 
organised clothing workers of the colony. 

That this private settlement with the clothing 
workers of Auckland was but the first of a series 
of manoeuvres to undo, at least in part, what 
had been accomplished in behalf of all the sew- 
ing women of New Zealand before the Board of 
Conciliation and Arbitration Court, appears 
from subsequent developments which took place 
immediately. 



Radical Employers 107 

The radicals among the employers in New 
Zealand are against trade-unions, first, last and 
all the time, as they are in the rest of the world, 
and they have always made their strongest 
fight, both outside and inside the Arbitration 
Court, against the obligation to employ all the 
trade-unionists before they employed any non- 
unionists. 

Hardly had the Auckland tailoresses made 
this settlement by private conciliation, in which 
they foolishly waived the preference for union- 
ists, than the manufacturers everywhere pro- 
ceeded to take advantage of it. 

The New Zealand Clothing Manufacturers' 
Association, representing the manufacturers of 
the whole colony, gave notice to the Board of 
Conciliation that its services were needed in an 
industrial dispute between themselves and the 
Federated Tailoresses and other trade-unions in 
the clothing industry. They significantly sub- 
mitted with this notice a copy of the new "log" 
which had been just made by private agreement 
in Auckland, as a basis upon which they desired 
a settlement of the dispute. 

It is evidently their intention to use the weak- 
ened position of the Auckland tailoresses as a 
standard of comparison by which to bring down 
the wages and conditions of employment of all 
the shirt-makers and clothing makers through- 
out the entire colony. They will undoubtedly 



108 A Country Without Strikes 

use the surrender of the preference for unionists 
by the Auckland working women as a precedent 
to induce the court to take away the preference 
from the workers in the rest of the country. 

This is one of the few cases in which asso- 
ciations of manufacturers have initiated arbitra- 
tion proceedings. So far, in most of the suits, 
the manufacturers have been on the defensive 
and the workingmen have been seeking the 
court, but now, when the manufacturers see a 
possibility of advantage for themselves, they are 
quick to appeal to the Arbitration law for its 
help. 

This retreat of the working women of Auck- 
land, from their strongest line of defence — 
unionism — and the ominousness of the instan- 
taneous appeal of the clothing manufacturers 
of the entire colony to the Court of Arbitration 
to make the same terms for all the shirt-makers 
and other clothing workers as the Auckland 
manufacturers have made for those in Auck- 
land, have roused the working women of the 
southern cities to renewed efforts to retrieve the 
situation. 

A circular comes to hand as I write, issued 
by Miss Whitehorn, the secretary of the Dun- 
edin branch of the tailoresses' trade-unions of 
New Zealand. In this circular she says the 
tailoresses of Wellington, Christchurch and 



An Amendment Needed 109 

Dunedin are threatened at the present time by 
their employers with a reduction of their present 
low rate of wages on account of the keen compe- 
tition of the Auckland manufacturers. The 
Dunedin Conciliation Board is reluctant to 
lower the existing rates of wages, yet it feels 
that it cannot help doing so unless the Auck- 
land manufacturers and operatives are dealt 
with in some way to equalise conditions north 
and south. 

Miss Whitehorn repeats what she said to me 
with regard to the efforts which her union has 
been making for ten years to place Auckland on 
the same basis of wages as other parts of the 
colony, as "they recognise it is only fair to all 
concerned that equal pay for equal work should 
be applied to all manufactured clothing in the 
colony, but unfortunately our efforts have 
proved unavailing." 

Her circular then goes on to show that the 
Arbitration Act in its present state does not give 
any help in solving this difficulty. An import- 
ant amendment to the act is needed and this has 
therefore been drafted for the tailoresses of the 
southern cities, and the representative of their 
district in Parliament has consented to introduce 
it. It applies of course to all trades. 

The amendment provides that as soon as by 
voluntary or compulsory arbitration certain 



no A Country Without Strikes 

terms have been established for a majority of 
the employers in any trade, these same terms 
may be made binding on all the rest in the trade 
throughout the colony. 

The effect of this amendment, if adopted, will 
be that, since the majority of the New Zealand 
clothing trade have already, in Wellington, 
Dunedin, Christchurch, been brought into agree- 
ment with the tailoresses through the Court of 
Arbitration, the manufacturers of Auckland, 
though not members of this majority, can be 
compelled by the court to give their tailoresses 
the same pay and the same conditions as the 
other manufacturers. 

This addition to the law will give the Court 
of Arbitration power to enforce on the minority 
terms acceptable to a majority. Thus the court 
can compel a minority of the employers in any 
business to accept and abide by the same terms 
for their working people as those agreed upon 
by a majority of their competitors. Compul- 
sory arbitration here, again, means government 
by the majority. Under this majority rule, the 
lowering of wages now imminent throughout 
the entire colony in the clothing trade, by such 
tactics as those pursued by the minority of 
Auckland manufacturers would be rendered im- 
possible. 

Since the act has been invoked in the clothing 
trades, nothing like the piteous and unavailing 



Still Warfare, but Humane 1 1 1 

uprising which took place among the women 
workers in New York a year ago is possible in 
New Zealand. There have been, as we have 
seen, continual differences in the trade, but there 
have been no strikes, and no need for them. 
None of the disturbances has taken on a more 
violent character than that which we can observe 
in the proceedings of any reasonable debating 
society. Higher wages, uniform terms, better 
conditions, a cessation of throat-cutting compe- 
tition have all been the beneficent results. This 
is at least a humaner manner of warfare, even if 
we have to admit that it is still warfare. 

Even if the plan of campaign of the Auckland 
manufacturers and their fellow members in the 
manufacturers' association proves successful 
and they are able to use the concessions weakly 
made by the operatives in Auckland, to take 
from the sewing women of the whole country 
some of the gains won from the Arbitration 
Court, it will still remain true that the result of 
arbitration has been a great uplift in the condi- 
tion of these distressed workers. The sweater 
has been sent to the right-about. He may yearn 
as he will for the return of the "good old times/' 
and for the music so sweet to his ears of the 
Song of the Shirt as it used to be sung, but he 
will yearn in vain. In New Zealand the old 
Song of the Shirt is a "lost chord." 

The relations between employer and em- 



H2 A Country Without Strikes 

ployed are still those of contest. It is still a 
battle that might be to the strong, a race that 
might be to the swift; but the difference be- 
tween the two kinds of struggle is the difference 
between a fair fight in an open field and a 
massacre. 

Under the old procedure of the old Song of 
the Shirt, the members of the New Zealand 
Manufacturers' Association, as soon as the 
Auckland manufacturers had made the breach 
we have described in the ranks of the Auckland 
operatives, would have cut down wages through- 
out the rest of the colony, and would have 
worsened the hours and the conditions of em- 
ployment at their own sweet will. 

The working women would have had the 
choice between starving rapidly and starving 
slowly. Whether they struck or worked on, 
they would have to retreat from the room in the 
second story to one in the attic or the cellar, 
from a scanty table to one still scantier. They 
would have made their last stand where the vis- 
itors of the poor find the sewing women singing 
their song, with a cup of tea and a crust of 
bread. 

But now, around the sewing women of New 
Zealand all the powers of government and so- 
ciety have drawn the protecting ring of the 
state. There are some printed pages, beginning 



As New Zealand Sings It 113 

Be It Enacted, on the shelves of Parliament, 
there are a few men in a new court-room who 
now have to be reckoned with by the manufac- 
turer before he can cut those wages and start 
the women on their way back to the tea and the 
garret and the crust. 

Now he must come out before the public, and 
in the presence of experts and judges, he must 
tell why he would do these things. He cannot 
deceive the public with glowing accounts of the 
immense wages that his women make. What- 
ever he ventures to assert on this subject, he 
must prove, and he must prove it before men 
accustomed to weigh such statements, and who 
know all about the lies that figures can be made 
to tell. And they will look at his books, too, if 
they think it best to do so in the interests of truth 
and humanity. 

Meanwhile, along with this inquiry in the new 
court-room, the work goes on. The sew r ing 
woman stays where she is in the factory kept 
clean and light and wholesome by the state, and 
she does not have to strike ; she cannot be locked 
out; her work cannot be taken from her; her 
wages cannot be cut down. 

This is the new Song of the Shirt, 



CHAPTER V. 

THIS LAW OF PARLIAMENT BECOMES A 
LAW OF TRADE. 

By this time the observant reader will have 
made the discovery which I made — a discovery 
which will do more to explain the compulsory 
arbitration of New Zealand than all the contro- 
versial matter he can find in the newspapers, 
or in all the political economies. Compulsory 
arbitration has been a success in New Zealand 
because the people wanted to arbitrate. 

The New Zealand people exhausted private 
effort to establish arbitration as we have seen in 
several trades. When they failed repeatedly in 
these private efforts and discovered that, though 
a majority wanted arbitration it was continually 
defeated by an intractable minority, they, as was 
natural, being also a democratic people, got ar- 
bitration for themselves by the political instru- 
ment at hand in their democracy — i. e., by a law. 
Law is the instrument through which de- 

H4 



A Choice of Evils 115 

mocracy equips a majority to maintain its wel- 
fare against the attacks of an anti-social mi- 
nority. 

It is, of course, an evil to need to have "laws." 
But it is a greater evil to have an anti-social 
minority knocking holes in the bottom of the 
ship. If the Tolstoians will abolish the scut- 
tling minority, we will abolish the "law based 
on force." 

This pre-disposition of the New Zealand peo- 
ple for arbitration argues a high intelligence and 
a high character and high political vigour — the 
intelligence to see the waste and inaccuracy of 
battle-field arbitration, the character that prefers 
kinder and juster ways, and the virility to use 
their votes to execute their will. 

We see in New Zealand, in case after case, 
that the New Zealanders are an arbitrating peo- 
ple. Arbitration was not sprung on them by 
theorists, or an innovating minority. The busi- 
ness men were moving in that direction, and, if 
they could have succeeded privately, they would 
not have had to have a law. The law was a suc- 
cess with them simply because it expressed and 
effectuated an opinion which the people had 
already formed. It satisfied a need of which 
they were already conscious. 

A compulsory arbitration law for a people not 
yet developed enough for the majority to seek to 



1 1 6 A Country Without Strikes 

arbitrate voluntarily, would be a folly. Equally, 
to say that among a people where the majority 
wanted to arbitrate, a compulsory arbitration 
law would be unnecessary, is to contradict the 
obvious fact that an unappeasable minority can, 
under the voluntary system, defeat arbitration, 
and can do it, as Mr. Reeves said to the New 
Zealand Parliament, for generation after gener- 
ation. The compulsion is not needed for the 
people in such a case, but for the minority who 
are defying and outraging the people. 

Here the New Zealanders show themselves to 
be, as in many other things, of the newest 
Anglo-Saxondom, for the Anglo-Saxon has 
always been a pioneer in arbitration, though he 
still fights too much. 

The only insuperable difficulties about com- 
pulsory arbitration have been the imaginary 
ones; all the real difficulties have been sur- 
mounted one by one as they appeared. The 
great bugbears of the disbelievers have been, 
"You cannot make men work by act of Parlia- 
ment/' and "You cannot fix prices by law." 

I found the opponents of compulsory arbitra- 
tion in New Zealand getting great comfort from 
the arguments against it which were furnished 
by the London Times in a controversy then 
on between it and the Agent-General of the 
colony in London, Mr. Reeves, the author of the 



Not Satisfied but Content 1 1 7 

law. A number of distinguished men took 
part in the controversy, the Bishop of Hereford, 
Lord Monkswell, Lord Thring, and others well 
known in the English world of thought and ac- 
tion, and an anonymous correspondent, "R," 
whose communications were always given the 
place of honour by the Times, and who was well 
understood to be Lord Rosebery. The articles 
were widely reprinted in the colony, and dis- 
cussed everywhere. 

The subject came up one day in a group at 
the club in Wellington. One of the critics of 
the law quoted triumphantly from a letter of 
Lord Thring's. 

"Is it conceivable that at the close of the 
nineteenth century either masters or men would 
submit to such a tyrannical judicial interference 
with their liberty?" 

"For five years," replied one of the New Zea- 
landers, "masters and men have been submitting. 
They may not be satisfied. Where anywhere 
are there satisfied capitalists or labourers? 
Where is there an employer who would not like 
to pay less, where the workingman who would 
not like to get more ? But they are all at work, 
though not satisfied. In New Zealand it is 
proved that the Arbitration Court can make de- 
cisions which both sides would rather accept 
than to quit, as they always have the right to do. 



1 1 8 A Country Without Strikes 

"The London Times, from which you get 
this remark of Lord Thring , s, ,, the speaker con- 
tinued, "says that, if a court makes an intol- 
erable award, employers will close their doors. 
In this the Times is quite right. It is there- 
fore the strongest possible commendation of the 
act in its theory and practice that the employers 
do not close their doors, but keep on doing busi- 
ness and making money, and this, too, although 
the awards have almost all been against them. 

"We all know that there have been numbers 
of withdrawals from business in England on 
account of strikes. As a result of the strike of 
the Amalgamated Society of Engineers a year 
ago, some very important concerns that I know 
of moved their works to Russia and Belgium 
and other countries. There have been no such 
withdrawals from New Zealand on account of 
the 'tyranny' of our Arbitration Court. 

"Our position in New Zealand is this : Indus- 
try is a joint enterprise. We say to the capital- 
ists: 

" 'You and the labourer and the consumer and 
the public are all interested. We — the state — 
are the only agency known to society which can 
protect and harmonise all these interests, pro- 
vided always that you cannot or will not har- 
monise yourselves. We cannot leave you to 
settle with each other in the old way, for that we 



The Capitalists do not Fly 1 1 9 

know by experience leads to strikes, devastation, 
hate, and even bloodshed. In this world of 
capitalists, labourers, consumers, and citizens, 
you, the employing capitalists are a very small 
minority. We don't propose to sacrifice you or 
do you any injustice, but, rest assured, neither 
do we intend to allow you to do us any wrong or 
injustice. You can stay in this business or go 
out of it, as you choose. You can go into any 
business you prefer, but, if you stay in business 
in New Zealand, you must settle your irreconcil- 
able differences between yourselves and your 
men by reference to a disinterested arbiter, and 
not by strikes or lockouts. You can have an 
arbiter of your own, if you prefer, but an arbiter 
you must have, and we will furnish the arbiter, 
if you do not find one for yourselves/ 

"Of course," he went on, "some of the capi- 
talists at first, as they always do, said they 
would 'leave the country,' but our reply was : 

Those are the only terms on which you can 
do business in New Zealand. If you don't like 
it, leave.' 

"But they did not leave. They stay, they ar- 
bitrate, and they prosper." 

A man prominent in labour matters here took 
up another point in Lord Thring's letter. 

"In the same article Lord Thring asks," he 
said, " 'Suppose one thousand men refused to 



i 20 A Country Without Strikes 

obey an award and would not go to work on the 
terms it prescribed, is it within the range of pos- 
sibility that the court would be able to imprison 
and fine one thousand men without producing 
riots more injurious than the strike?' 

"We see the capitalists," the labour man said, 
"all over the world succeed in forcing the work- 
ingmen to go to work on terms unsatisfactory to 
them. Are we to suppose that the state is less 
powerful than the capitalists ? And are not the 
workingmen more likely to obey a decision in! 
the making of w T hich they have been represented 
than in one made by the capitalists who would 
not receive their delegates, nor listen to a word 
from their side ? The workingmen certainly 
would riot and smash things, if the decision 
were absolutely intolerable. In the last five 
years in Europe and America there have been 
riots, arson, and even dynamite in consequence 
of decisions forced on labour by capital, but no- 
where has there been a breath of disturbance in 
New Zealand on account of any decision forced 
on labour by arbitration, and labour has had to 
submit to some things from the Arbitration 
Court which it found very hard to accept." 

In the same conversation the London Spec- 
tator was quoted as expressing the opinion 
that compulsory arbitration made slaves of the 
workingmen : 



A Popular Slavery 121 

"If wages are fixed by the external authority 
of a court, the individual workman must accept 
them, that is, must become practically a slave 
for the benefit of the community." 

"The workingman has no choice, in any case 
with or without arbitration/' his representative 
retorted, "but to 'accept wages that are fixed/ 
The only practical question for him is, how are 
they to be fixed? In the world of strikes and 
lockouts, he usually has to submit to wages fixed 
by force, economic violence, which denies him 
hearing, information, the right to organise, or 
even recognition. 

"In the case of arbitration he submits to a de- 
cision given by the nearest approach to a disin- 
terested outsider that human ingenuity can 
provide. The decision is based expressly upon 
the recognition of his equality of rights, and on 
the fullest examination by him and for him of 
every book, paper and person necessary for the 
discovery of all the facts affecting his interest. 
The workingmen of New Zealand like that kind 
of 'slavery.' They are practically all registered, 
and the employers like the same kind of 'slav- 
ery/ for the most important of them are regis- 
tered under the law — the shoe manufacturers, 
the clothing manufacturers, the great coal com- 
panies, the steamship owners, and many others/' 

The letters of "R," whom everybody believed 



122 A Country Without Strikes 

to be Lord Rosebery, came in for their share of 
attention. "R," speaking of what would hap- 
pen, if the court made a decision intolerable 
either to workingmen or employer, had said : 

"In either case, the award is a dead letter ; the 
court is impotent, and the law of the market is 
supreme, as it was in the beginning and ever 
shall be." 

A friend of Mr. Reeves who was present read 
the reply which Mr. Reeves had made to "R" in 
the Times. 

"Why assume that the awards of a competent 
tribunal will be intolerable to one side or the 
other ? It is likely enough, nay, certain, that all 
awards must be disagreeable to somebody, but 
intolerable is a word which pre-supposes that 
awards are likely to be made which will involve 
one side or the other in ruin, or drive it to des- 
peration." 

To this he added the remark which Mr. 
Reeves made in answer to the same objection 
when the bill was before Parliament. 

"This court may be assumed to have common 
sense and not to be composed of unreasonable 
madmen." 

"Moreover," Mr. Reeves' friend continued, 
"the law of arbitration has now become part of 
the 'law of the market/ The New Zealand 
theory is that a judge, skilled in the examin- 



The Better Judge 123 

ation of facts and in the disentanglement of con- 
troversies, assisted by experts from both sides, 
and by additional experts if needed, can tell 
better what the 'law of the market' is than the 
employers or employes, drunk with greed, pas- 
sion or stupidity. Compulsory arbitration does 
not attempt any interference with the 'law of 
the market.' On the contrary, it gives the 'law 
of the market' for the first time a full chance to 
work. It brings the 'law of the market' into 
full and free discussion. It offers experts who 
know the 'law of the market' best on both sides 
to tell all they know about it. It gives it pub- 
licity and debate. It is true the arbiter makes 
the decision, but a decision must be made any- 
how, and has been made heretofore in most 
cases by the casting vote of suffering, selfish- 
ness, or passion. The casting vote of Judge 
Edwards is better, we New Zealanders think." 

There was a senator present, one of the Lib- 
erals, and a man who claimed to be a friend of 
the law, but he insisted that "its compulsion 
made it odious," and he argued that "public 
opinion should be the only force behind the law." 

One of the most successful business men and 
large employers in New Zealand said in reply to 
him: 

"The compulsory feature of the law is a ne- 
cessity, for it fixes the moral position of the 



124 A Country Without Strikes 

parties, if they should either of them break 
through the award. Our reliance that awards 
will not be unreasonable can safely rest upon 
the general common sense of the court and the 
public." 

And the labour member said as to this point : 

"As for the force of public opinion, which 
you are so anxious to have as the only force be- 
hind the award, we will agree to that as soon as 
public opinion is made the only force behind all 
other laws, and no sooner." 

The labour member was a trifle bitter in pri- 
vate conversation afterwards, in his comments 
upon this liberal. He accused him of being one 
of those who tried at the preceding session of 
Parliament, under the cover of friendship for 
the law, to cripple its most important provision, 
next to compulsory arbitration, that is, prefer- 
ence to trade-unions, by having the title 
amended so as to strike out the words, "to en- 
courage the formation of industrial unions and 
associations." 

The amendment was made, but the court, as 
I have explained elsewhere, continued in its 
policy of giving the trade-unions preference 
wherever possible. 

"You will not find opponents of the law like 
him," said the labour member, "declaring them- 
selves against its arbitration but only against its 



Compulsion Everywhere 125 

compulsion. All the enemies of the law, in 
fact, avow themselves passionate devotees of 
arbitration, and all they ask is that the compul- 
sion shall be stricken out of the law, so that they 
can give the world the magnificent spectacle of 
voluntary arbitration for which they yearn. 
But these same men refused arbitration when it 
was not compulsory. At the worst, the compul- 
sion, we think, can do them no real harm, since 
it only forces these devotees of arbitration to 
do what they profess to be willing to do without 
the law. If they had given us conciliation when 
it was in their power, we would not have asked 
for compulsion." 

It is plain that the vast majority of the people 
of New Zealand are not at all shocked by the 
"compulsion" on which so many changes are 
rung by the opponents of the law. They re- 
gard "compulsion" as a very proper instrument 
to be used by democracy when it is necessary to 
protect the rights of the majority against the 
minority. 

"We cannot understand," was said to me, 
"why compulsion cannot be used to prevent eco- 
nomic crime as well as any other crime, or to 
repel economic invasion of one class by another, 
which is just the same thing, for all intents and 
purposes, as the invasion of one country by 
another." 



126 A Country Without Strikes 

The compulsion, too, is defended by citing the 
precedents given by the factory acts, the laws 
for the regulation of mining, sanitary conditions 
and other labour matters, the regulation of rail- 
road rates in all civilised countries. In one of 
the cases before the Arbitration Court, the 
judge said : 

"There is coercion in everything, and the only 
question is, where is coercion to begin, and 
where is it going to end. A man is not allowed 
to ride his bicycle along the footpath; he is 
coerced into riding along the muddy road." 

In a debate in Parliament on the compulsory 
feature of the law, one of its defenders quoted 
the words of William Pitt, when speaking on 
the Arbitration Act of his day, which was an- 
alogous in principle to the New Zealand law. 

"The time will come when manufactures will 
have been so long established, the operatives not 
having any other position to fill, that it will be 
in the power of any one man in a town to reduce 
wages and all the other manufacturers must fol- 
low. If ever it does arrive at this pitch, Parlia- 
ment, if it be not then sitting, ought to be called 
together, and, if it cannot redress your griev- 
ances, its power is at an end. Tell me not that 
Parliament cannot. Its power is omnipotent 
to protect." 

"It is not a choice," one of the group said, 



Voluntary Compulsion 127 

''between compulsion and no compulsion; it is 
a choice between two kinds of compulsion, that 
of a court, or that of labourers or capitalists, 
resorting to what Mr. Reeves, in urging the bill, 
called their 'sacred right of insurrection/ " 

"After all," urged another, "the compulsion 
is voluntary. The contestants are free to have 
their own arbitrator, if they choose, but, if they 
will not choose one, the people will do it for 
them. Disinterested men can be found, and 
disinterested men can find the truth. By giving 
this duty of disinterested decision to a Judge of 
the Supreme Court, more honest, competent and 
just than the average citizen, the state guaran- 
tees that the decision by compulsory arbitration 
will be in the long run more advantageous to 
the warring parties than one made by them- 
selves. 

"The compulsion is not for the majority, but 
for the minority. The majority both of em- 
ployers and employes in many trades wanted to 
arbitrate, but they could not until this law was 
passed, because the minority would not. As in 
other laws so in this, compulsion is not for the 
good men, but for the bad men. Good citizens 
do not feel that they pay their taxes under com- 
pulsion, they are willing to pay, and they are 
willing to have a compulsory law on the statute 
book to compel not themselves, but the 
shirkers." 



128 A Country Without Strikes 

The gentlemen who were attacking the law, 
here changed to their other argument. 

"You can't fix prices by law, neither prices 
of labour nor of anything else." 

"As a matter of fact," said the labour repre- 
sentative, who had made a similar reply to the 
similar argument about "the impossibility of 
making men work by law," "the Arbitration 
Court does fix prices and fix them so that the 
employers are willing to pay them, and the 
employed are glad to receive them. But it is 
not really correct to say that this is a case of 
wages 'fixed by law.' The law does not fix the 
prices. The price is fixed by the facts of the 
economic situation. By our tribunal, for the 
first time in any civilised country, the facts of 
the case can be found, published, and, where 
there is a dispute, settled by an umpire whose 
decision all can trust. The law simply sees to it 
that the decision between conflicting claims as to 
prices is made by discussion and disinterested- 
ness, and not by force, or fraud, or secrecy." 

"Suppose," said an American who was pres- 
ent, "suppose the Court of Arbitration selected 
by a 'boss' should decide that a dollar and a half 
for twelve hours' work a day was enough for 
the men, how would the workingmen like that?" 

"How do they like what they get now?" was 
the answer of the New Zealander, "forced to 



Fixing Prices 129 

strike as they are, with no chance of publicity, 
and to submit to a decision backed by injunc- 
tions, Pinkertons, and the military? 

"Force to compel a factory to run at a loss 
would be worth nothing. Force to compel a 
prosperous manufacturer to reveal his prosperity 
so that his workingmen may share his prosperity 
is force that counts for a great deal, and that is 
where the shoe pinches the men who 'want it all/ 
The compulsion is not that the manufacturer 
shall run, but that while he runs, he shall run 
justly. Society certainly has the right to decree 
and enforce this. There is no 'fixing wages by 
law/ no compulsion, no interference, excepting 
in one contingency. Masters and men are left 
free to make any agreement they choose; they 
can negotiate privately; trade-unions can be re- 
fused recognition or not ; they can mediate their 
differences by any form of voluntary concilia- 
tion or arbitration they like; the employer can 
give up his business, the workingman can change 
his occupation. The state says nothing. But 
the moment one party attempts to force the 
other, the State of New Zealand can be called in. 

" 'Fixing by law' is an odious phrase. How 
about fixing prices by the fiat of a corporation or 
a capitalist or by bayonets, or by starvation or 
intimidation? Here, 'law' means debate; the 
lack of it means destruction for the men. The 



1 30 A Country Without Strikes 

law does not dictate nor fix wages, but merely 
decides in a dispute between two different views 
of what wages should be. 'Law' fixes creditors' 
shares in bankruptcy, lowers Irish and Scotch 
rents, fixes the price of ferries, railroads, the 
salaries of state officials, rate of taxation. 

"Our Arbitration Court simply determines 
what is just between two parties under existing 
economic conditions. It does not attempt to 
create or modify economic conditions. It does 
not try to compel either labour or capital to 
work, but it does try to prevent either from 
throwing upon the other all the burden of the 
fluctuations in supply and demand. It will not 
allow them to coerce each other by economic 
force either of labour or capital. If economic 
conditions are such that the industry cannot be 
carried on by capital without ruin, or by labour 
without starvation, the disputant who is in the 
right can easily make the court see that. The 
court simply does the best that can be done to 
effect a proper distribution of the economic 
pressure on the two parties/' 

The practical ability of the judges and the 
consideration they have shown for all sides have 
had a great deal to do with making compulsion 
workable. The judge, who "kncws nothing 
of business," sometimes proves to know more 
than the business man about his own business. 



Judges of Business 131 

In one case of which I was told by a distin- 
guished member of Parliament, a labour repre- 
sentative who was the advocate for the men 
before the court in a dispute between the tailors 
and their employers, one of the latter declared 
solemnly that an advance of five per cent, in 
wages would ruin him. 

My informant believes that in making this 
statement the employer was entirely honest. 
The decision of the court was in favour of the 
men, and the advance in wages given was con- 
siderably more than five per cent. 

Meeting this employer some time afterwards, 
the labour member asked him how the award 
had affected him. 

"I believe," was his reply, "it will work out 
all right. We have reorganised our methods 
and are getting along first-rate." 

The judges frequently take occasion to make 
such remarks as Judge Edwards addressed to 
the iron moulders. He reminded this union 
that "the condition of the trade had to be con- 
sidered, for disaster to the masters would mean 
disaster to the workers." 

And to me, Judge Edwards, in speaking of a de- 
cision which he had rendered in the boot makers' 
case, said that the wages had been fixed by the 
court as high as they could be, but that they 
were still altogether too low. But, he said, the 



132 A Country Without Strikes 

court could not fix the wages at a price that 
would ruin the industry. 

In one case the judge refused to shorten the 
hours on Saturday, "because that would cause 
inconvenience to other trades." 

The Arbitration Law as administered by the 
judges in New Zealand aims to play within liv- 
ing limits for both employers and employes. 

In another case the concession asked for by 
the employes was refused by the court because, 
the judge said, it would be "an innovation/' 

Since the act has gone into operation at a time 
of expanding industry and rising prices, the ap- 
plications of the men for higher wages have 
been uniformly granted, at least in part. But 
the court has shown itself quite able to discrim- 
inate when discrimination was called for. 

The Consolidated Gold Fields Company low- 
ered the wages of its men from 10s. ($2.50) to 
8s. 4d. ($2.08) a day. The miners held a meet- 
ing, discontinued work for three weeks, and 
then formed themselves into a union and re- 
ferred their case to the Conciliation Board. 
Pending its decision, they resumed their work 
at 9s. ($2.25) a day. 

The case went on up to the Court of Arbitra- 
tion. The judge decided that the reduction of 
wages had been premature, but, looking to the 
large amount of money that was being spent by 



Arbitration and Competition 133 

the company in prospecting and opening up new- 
ground, these being non-paying operations, he 
ruled that the miners should consent to take a 
lower wage for a limited period-, after which 
they should be permitted to open the whole ques- 
tion. Their wages were therefore fixed at 9s. 
6d. ($2.37) a day temporarily. 

It has been the aim of the court wherever 
possible in its awards to make conditions uni- 
form for all parts of the colony for all the mem- 
bers of the trade before it. The court did this 
in the painting trade. In deciding a much more 
difficult case, that of the iron moulders of Well- 
ington, the court said : 

"It is not difficult to make conditions uniform 
in such a trade as that of the painters, for they 
are not in competition with those of distant 
towns. Increasing the wages of painters and 
making them the same throughout the colony, 
does not mean giving an advantage to a painter 
in Auckland over one in Invercargill. In towns 
where the wages w r ere raised to the level ruling 
elsewhere, it means only that the person for 
whom the business was done had to pay a little 
more for it." 

But the firms in the moulding business, in the 
various towns of the colony, are in sharp compe- 
tition with each other. In fixing wages to be 
paid the employes of the iron moulding firms of 



134 A Country Without Strikes 

Wellington, the judge said the court ought to be 
very careful not to cause an interference with 
trade, and drive it from one part of the colony 
to the other, a possibility disastrous to em- 
ployers and employes alike. 

The decision fixed the wages of the Welling- 
ton iron moulders at 9s. ($2.25) a day, although 
the same class of employes were paid 10s. 
($2.50) a day in Dunedin, and living and rent 
were cheaper there than in Wellington. 

It was no doubt a great misfortune, the court 
said, that they could not take into consideration 
all parts of the colony and fix a wage for all — 
not necessarily the same wage, but one that 
would do justice to the workers, while not in- 
flicting injustice on employers ; but all they could 
do in this case at present was to see that, while 
the men got a fair living wage, the masters were 
not injured. 

The court would have liked to see the Well- 
ington iron moulders paid the same wages as 
those in Dunedin, the judge said, but it was 
plain they ought not to interfere with the pres- 
ent conditions as to the rate of wages which 
seemed to be fair wages in Wellington for men 
of that class. They made the award operative 
for a year only, as they had done in the com- 
peting town of Christchurch a few weeks back. 
This was in the hope that during the year they 
would be able to consider the conditions of the 



Afraid of the Judges 135 

trade and their effect upon workingmen in each 
branch of the trade throughout the colony, and 
perhaps make an arrangement on a basis which 
would give satisfaction all around. 

AYhen I asked the workingmen of South Aus- 
tralia why practically none of their unions had 
registered under the Arbitration Law of that 
colony, the reply was that they were afraid of 
some of their judges. The large number of 
New Zealand unions and business men's associ- 
ations that have organised to qualify themselves 
to appear before the Arbitration Court shows 
that they have no fear of that kind. 

One of the benefits anticipated from the act 
was that the very fact that such a law was on the 
statute books would render appeals to it un- 
necessary. This has proved so. When both 
employers and employes know that either can 
summon the other before a tribunal which has 
the power to make a decision between them, and 
to enforce it, they are likely to think twice be- 
fore they insist on unreasonable demands. They 
will be careful about running the risk of being 
involved in proceedings which will cause an ex- 
pensive waste of time and money. 

This news paragraph gives a significant hint 
of how much surer is the footing of the men 
when they ask for better terms with an Arbitra- 
tion Law in the background than elsewhere : 

"At a meeting of the employes of the iron 



136 A Country Without Strikes 

trade in Auckland, a number of masters were 
also present. The workers demand shorter 
hours, better wages, and the regulation of ap- 
prentices. All the employers are to be invited 
to consider the demands before application is 
made to the Conciliation Board." 

Items like the following are not infrequent 
in tine New Zealand newspapers. 

"The furniture workers and employers have 
come to an agreement to extend the present 
award for two years." 

This was the second time that such a settle- 
ment had been made in this trade, and similar 
occurrences are continually taking place. These 
people having once been before the court were so 
well satisfied with the justice and reasonableness 
of its decisions, that they renewed it voluntarily 
without invoking its aid. 

I was in Dunedin when an even pleasanter 
incident brought into view one of the unex- 
pected uses of the new tribunal. 

The printing trade there as everywhere was 
being revolutionised by a typesetting machine, 
and the typographical union had sued their em- 
ployers, the two principal dailies, in the new 
court. The men's case had to be thrown out 
for a fatal defect in their procedure, but, having 
come together, neither side liked the idea of 
separating with nothing accomplished. 



Out of Court 137 

"Although the court could do nothing of- 
ficially, perhaps it would have no objection to 
see if it could do something unofficially ?" 

No sooner said than done. The judge was 
willing and an informal conference was held 
in which all joined. This friendly talk led to a 
further meeting in the evening of a more de- 
liberate character. This was attended by the 
judge, the other members of the court, represen- 
tatives of the typographical associations, and the 
employers. Judge Edwards presided, and the 
Otago Daily Times of Dunedin says in its re- 
port, "gave some impartial and friendly counsel 
to the parties to the dispute, urging them to 
settle their differences, if it were at all possible 
for them to do so. Employers and men ex- 
pressed their appreciation of the disinterested 
service rendered, in an unofficial way by the 
president of the court, and the result, after a 
protracted discussion, was the arranging of a 
further meeting to be held to-day, which, there 
is some reason to believe, will insure a settle- 
ment of the dispute." 

The adjourned meeting was held in the morn- 
ing, and the representatives of the newspapers 
and the printers met, with full powers to come 
to an agreement, if they could. After a short 
discussion, an agreement was arrived at on the 
same terms as had been agreed to in Christ- 



138 A Country Without Strikes 

church and Wellington, and, says the news- 
paper : 

"It is felt that this amicable settlement is 
largely due to the kindly intervention of the 
judge." 

The employers conceded one of the principal 
points of difference, that about men newly put 
at work on machines — probationers. It was 
agreed that they should be paid full weekly 
wages from the time of starting, £3 6s. ($16.50) 
for night work, and £3 ($15.00) for day work 
of seven hours. 

A sufficiently dramatic contrast to this picture 
of amicable and uncostly compromise can be 
found in the strike which occurred a year or two 
ago in Chicago, in which all the daily news- 
papers in the city suspended publication for sev- 
eral days. 

Nowhere is the conservatism of the people 
and of the judges who have the Compulsory 
Arbitration law to administer better shown 
than in dealing with that part of the law which 
relates to penalties. This has been the last 
chapter in the development of the administration 
of the law, and the demonstration of the ability 
and determination of the judges to enforce pen- 
alties when necessary, has given the crowning 
touch to the stability and dignity of the court. 

The penalties for violation of an award were 



Enforcement of Penalties 139 

obviously intended by the law as first passed to 
be fine or imprisonment, or both, but, through 
.some defect in the drafting, the only penalty 
which could be enforced was imprisonment. 
Undoubtedly the fear of so harsh a punishment 
had its influence in keeping those subject to the 
award in line, but the workingmen and their 
friends feared that some case of obduracy might 
one day occur which would have to be pun- 
ished, and that if anything so severe as com- 
mittal to jail were inflicted for the breach of a 
law so novel, there might be a revulsion of 
public opinion, and possibly all that had been 
achieved might be overthrown. 

By common consent the law was so amended 
that fines as originally contemplated could be 
levied and enforced. That done, the judges 
show a firm hand in dealing with offenders. 

In deciding the case of the shoe manufactur- 
ers outside the manufacturers' association which 
has been described in a preceding chapter, the 
court fined them the sum of £5 ($25) each, to 
be paid to the union of their men as reimburse- 
ment of the expense to which they had been put 
in bringing the employers before the court. 

In another case, two mining companies, 
which had paid their men only 8s. 6d. ($2.12) 
a day, instead of 10s. ($2.50) a day, which had 
been awarded by the court, were fined £25 



140 A Country Without Strikes 

($125.00) each and ordered to pay the wages 
originally fixed by the court. 

A master plumber was brought before the 
Arbitration Court and shown to have been guilty 
of three breaches of an award given in the case 
between him and his employes. He had not 
paid the wages stipulated, he had employed 
more than the prescribed number of assistants, 
and he had neglected to supply his workingmen 
with tools. 

The court took a serious view of the case. It 
said that it had come to the conclusion that this 
employer had set out deliberately to disregard 
its award ; he had continued to do so, even after 
bis men had remonstrated with him; his pay- 
ment of less wages than prescribed was wilful; 
he had thus been able to enter into unfair com- 
petition with other firms. Unless the awards of 
the court were to become a nullity, it said, a 
substantial fine must be inflicted. When it 
could be proved that the persons evading an 
award reaped pecuniary advantage thereby, the 
penalty must, as nearly as possible, be figured to 
deprive them of that benefit. 

The penalty would therefore in this case, the 
first offence, be fixed at £20 ($100). The sec- 
ond breach was found to be only a slight one, 
and a penalty of 5s. ($1.25) was imposed for 
that. As to the supply of tools, the court found 



Cost of Disobedience 141 

that the journeymen obtained their tools only 
with very great difficulty. They were furnished 
obviously in such a way as to drive them to buy- 
ing tools out of their pockets in order to retain 
their employment. But the court, in view of the 
fines already enforced, would take a merciful 
view of this breach, it said, and impose a penalty 
of only fi ($5). 

But the guilty man was also amerced in the 
payment of £7 '7s. ($36.75) costs, which he had 
to reimburse to the union, and he had in addition 
to this to pay the witnesses' expenses and the 
court fees. He was ordered to reimburse the 
union its costs, the court said, because the hear- 
ing of the case had occupied a whole day, and 
the defence had been wholly without merit. 
Both employers and workmen must understand, 
it warned them, that when they occupied the 
time of the judge and arbitrators in hearing a 
frivolous defence or a frivolous claim, they 
would have to bear not only the penalty, but the 
costs. 

A baker, who began work earlier than the 
hour set by the court to govern the whole trade, 
was adjudged to have been guilty "of a deliber- 
ate infringement," and called upon to pay what 
the judge described as a "moderate penalty," 
£10 ($50), besides all the costs. 

But when another baker was before the court, 



142 A Country Without Strikes 

he was dealt with very much more mercifully. 
He was shown to have been guilty of a persist- 
ent breach of the award, in beginning work 
earlier than his competitors. But the bench 
would not inflict a very heavy fine, it said, partly 
"because he did not appear to be in a very large 
way of business." His fine was therefore made 
40s. ($10), but he was also compelled to pay all 
the costs and court fees. 

Some of the workingmen in their applications 
for the infliction of penalty showed some indi- 
cations of a vindictive spirit and a desire to get 
a snap judgment on their employers, but the 
court was peremptory in rebuking and defeat- 
ing these attempts. 

In one of the disputes in the baking trade, the 
court found that the employer had been un- 
doubtedly guilty of a breach, but it found also 
that the union had not begun proceedings 
against him until some months after the occur- 
rence, and had given him no notice whatever of 
the alleged breach of the award, and had made 
no request of him for any explanation. The 
court thought the course taken by the union sug- 
gested rather an undue anxiety to get a case 
against him than any dread of oppression on his 
part. It declared itself satisfied that, if the em- 
ployer had been notified that the wage fixed by 
the award must be paid, or, if the union had 



No Room for Vindictiveness 143 

requested the payment of the amount, there 
would have been no necessity for the present 
proceedings. However, as there had been a 
breach of the award, it felt itself bound to im- 
pose a penalty, for it was the duty of employers 
to obey the provisions of the award, without 
any request by their workingmen. 

"Under these circumstances, a fine of 20s. 
($5) and court costs will be sufficient to call the 
attention of employers to the necessity of a strict 
observance on their part of the provisions of the 
award, even though no mention of such provis- 
ions was made by the workingman, and even 
though the workingman may be a consenting 
party to the breach." 

The court lectured the representatives of the 
union severely on their conduct of these cases, 
and told them that where they had reason to be- 
lieve that any employer was not acting up to the 
terms of an award, it was their duty before tak- 
ing steps to make him a party to quasi-criminal 
proceedings, to endeavour to come to some 
amicable settlement with him. If the unions did 
not do this, they were not acting, the court told 
them, in the best interests of unionism. 

Several similar cases to the one just described 
have been brought before the court, and it has 
always made the same ruling. Wherever it 
finds that the union has proceeded against an 



144 A Country Without Strikes 

employer without making any endeavour to 
come to an amicable understanding with him, 
and without giving him any notice to discon- 
tinue his objectionable practice, and with no 
warning that he was to be taken before the 
court, it has imposed almost nominal penalties. 

The employers met the Arbitration Act at 
first with a great deal of resistance, active and 
passive. They refused to register under the act, 
but they found that this did not prevent them 
from being called into court. They refused to 
exercise their right of electing representatives 
for the Conciliation Boards and Courts of Arbi- 
tration. The government thereupon exercised 
its right to make elections for them. They re- 
fused to appear before the court. Their cases 
then went by default. 

One of the members of Parliament, who was 
also a member of one of the Conciliation Boards, 
told me of a case in which a large corporation, 
when summoned before the court, began pro- 
ceedings by dictating as to the methods of pro- 
cedure to be followed. When they found that 
they could not have their own way, they declared 
that they would withdraw. They were there- 
upon told that they could do so, if they chose, 
but that if they did, they would be in the same 
position as any other party before a court — 
judgment would go against them by default on 



One Fruit of Publicity 145 

all points. They then decided to remain and 
fight it out. They did so, and lost. 

In this case, notice was given to the company 
that they must produce either their books or a 
sworn statement of certain particulars as to their 
business, which were needed to decide between 
them and their men. This ended the proceed- 
ings. To save themselves the production of 
their books, they at once came to an agreement 
with their men. They have since renewed this 
agreement without the intervention of the court. 

One of the important gold-mining companies 
in New Zealand sought to escape the Court of 
Arbitration when summoned by its men by 
pleading that it was not subject to the jurisdic- 
tion of the court. 

"Our company is registered in Britain and is 
not resident in New Zealand," the manager said. 

But the chairman put this argument aside. 
"Any one who is an employer in New Zealand 
can be made a party to these proceedings." 

Some of the employers complained to me that : 
they were compelled to go into court on trivial 
grounds, and that their time and that of the 
court and the public money was thus wasted, 
and the author of the law, in his book on New 
Zealand, "The Long White Cloud," warns the 
trade-unions that they have shown a tendency 
to make too frequent a use of it. 



146 A Country Without Strikes 

The court has the power to dismiss trivial or 
frivolous cases and to put the costs on the of- 
fender. Representatives of the masters are 
members both of the Boards of Conciliation and 
the Court of Arbitration, and the masters them- 
selves appear before them and can point out any 
instances of such litigation. 

"We must deal with human nature as it is," 
one of the labour members said to me in dis- 
cussing this objection. "Which is better, to 
leave the fools and mischief-makers to bring on 
strikes, or to bring on arbitration? Agitators 
foment disturbances to bring the masters before 
the court. It is suspected sometimes that even 
members of the Conciliation Board, who are 
paid for the number of days they sit, do the same 
thing. But which is worse, that agitators 
should foment arbitration, or foment strikes ?" 

Another objection often made is, that in con- 
sequence of the law, industry is disturbed by 
the frequency of disputes; but when I looked 
into the number of cases before the court, I 
found that there had only been about fifty in 
five years, about one case a month. 

This, too, it is only fair to remember, is the 
number of disputes at the beginning of the ad- 
ministration of the law. Every decision that 
settles questions makes precedents that will pre- 
vent other disputes from being brought forward. 



Two Cases in Four Years 147 

This point about the disturbance of industry 
was well met by Mr. Reeves in one of his letters 
to the London Times, in the controversy 
already mentioned. An Auckland paper had 
been quoted as authority for the complaint that 
the act kept the colony in a state of seething in- 
dustrial ferment. Auckland, as Mr. Reeves 
pointed out in his reply, is a large and flourish- 
ing district, comprising about a fifth of New 
Zealand : 

"But how many disputes were there in the 
Auckland district during the four years after the 
passing of the act, that is, from October, 1894, 
to October, 1898? Two! Two cases in four 
years !" 

When the amending act of 1898 was before 
the Labour Bills' Committee of Parliament, the 
only appearance against the bill was made by a 
business man who was an active leader in organ- 
ising associations of employers for the purpose 
of protecting their interests in labour legislation 
and similar matters. He is the president of one 
of these associations called the Industrial Cor- 
poration of New Zealand. 

I got from him an interesting account of the 
methods pursued by his association in the Mari- 
time Strike of 1890. When the men, seeing 
that they were beaten, appealed to the govern- 
ment to intercede with the employers to meet 



148 A Country Without Strikes 

them, the government communicated with this 
association, the Industrial Corporation. Tts 
President, my informant, wired to all the 
other employers' associations in the country 
the answer they should make. This was in 
substance uniform, to wit : That they were sat- 
isfied with things as they were. The wording 
was varied so as not to make it seem that they 
were all acting in concert, but the substance was 
the same. The men were defeated. 

As a representative of this Industrial Corpor- 
ation this gentleman appeared before the Labour 
Bills' Committee, and his statement is printed in 
its report among the parliamentary papers. 
His main points were: That the law was unjust 
to the masters, because, while they had property 
and could pay any penalty imposed, fines could 
not be enforced against the trade-unions since 
they had nothing. That the workingmen could 
have the law enforced against the employer, but 
he, in his turn, had no remedy against the em- 
ployes, if they chose to disobey the award. That 
you cannot compel men, labourers or capitalists, 
to work by act of Parliament. That the em- 
ployers of New Zealand had to compete with 
employers in other countries, with Argentina, 
for example, in the export of meat to England, 
where there were no arbitration laws to ham- 
per their rivals. That the experience of Eng- 



"These Infernal Bills" 149 

land proved that conciliation, not arbitration, 
was to be the potent factor in settling trade dis- 
putes in the future. Finally, that New Zea- 
land prosperity was declining; the poor were 
poorer; there were £5,000,000 sterling ($25,- 
000,000) lying idle in the banks; capital refused 
to embark in new enterprises. "In my opinion," 
he concluded, "the unwise measures passed by 
the New Zealand Parliament are entirely re- 
sponsible for this." "These infernal bills/' he 
called the Arbitration Acts. 

The labour men whom I questioned as to 
whether it was true that the awards could not 
be enforced against workingmen made replies 
that seemed conclusive. A very large propor- 
tion of the trade-unionists in New Zealand own 
their own homes, a larger proportion, perhaps, 
than in any other country. A penalty of £10 
($50) could certainly be collected from such 
men. As to the argument that the provision 
for penalties was useless because no employer 
would be so cruel as to attempt to have $50 
fines levied on recalcitrant workmen, the men 
laughed at this assumption of soft-heartedness 
and pointed to the conduct of the employers in 
New South Wales in sending the leaders of 
strikes there to jail for years. Trade-unions 
have the power of collecting dues from their 
members, which w T ould easily realise the maxi- 



150 A Country Without Strikes 

mum penalty of £500 ($2,500), that can be 
levied. The boot makers spent £6,000 ($30- 
000) on one strike before the days of arbitra- 
tion. 

Besides, as one of the members of Parliament 
said, the workingman who sets out to disobey an 
award, will not only have to leave town, he will 
have to leave the district, for the award covers 
the whole of a district. He will often have to 
leave the colony, for many of the awards are 
made to apply to the country at large. 

The same point applies to the manufacturer. 
The court, in making its decision, considers not 
only the conditions of the individual manufac- 
turer, but those of the whole trade in the dis- 
trict, and, whenever possible, those of the whole 
colony. 

To the suggestion that men in collusion with 
the trade-union officials might quit work, but 
receive sick pay, or strike pay, the answer was 
made that many of the trade-unions had no sick 
funds, and as for strike pay they could not get 
that. Every cent of expenditure by a trade- 
union has to be reported to the registrar of the 
friendly societies. No expenditure is legal that 
is not allowed by the rules of the society as 
registered. For any illegal expenditures, every 
officer of the union is personally liable. 

One change which the Industrial Corporation 



Independence of the Court 151 

sought to have made in the law it obtained. 
This was that the words in the title "to encour- 
age the formation of industrial unions and asso- 
ciations" should be stricken out. They wanted 
these eliminated to remove one ground on which 
the judges had given preference to trade-unions. 
They succeeded in getting the change made, but 
it has not produced any effect upon the decisions 
by the judges. The latest news in January, 
1900, is that this association and other organisa- 
tions of employers are to take this sore point to 
the Supreme Court to obtain a decision forbid- 
ding the Arbitration Court to continue its pref- 
erence to trade-unionists. The friends of 
arbitration hope this appeal to the Supreme 
Court to interfere, will be ineffectual in view of 
the explicit language of the act already referred 
to, making the Arbitration Court independent of 
the other courts: "No award or proceeding of 
the Court shall be liable to be challenged, ap- 
pealed against, reviewed, quashed, or called in 
question by any Court of Judicature on any ac- 
count whatsoever." 



CHAPTER VI. 

WHAT IT COSTS AND WHAT IT PAYS. 

The total cost of the administration of the 
Arbitration and Conciliation Act during 1898-9 
was £1,359 ($6,795). O f this the Arbitration 
Court was responsible for £656 ($3,280), the 
Conciliation Board £734 ($3,670), and the 
legal expenses were £12 ($60). The total cost 
to November 1, 1899 — four years — has been 
£4,400 ($22,000). 

What did the country get for this expen- 
diture ? 

The only country in the world where for four 
years there have been no strikes or lockouts, is 
the only country where there is a compulsory 
arbitration law, New Zealand, and New Zealand 
is to-day more prosperous than it ever has been 
before, and is, as far as my observation goes, 
the most prosperous country in the world. 

The Otago Daily Times, the leading oppo- 
sition paper in the colony, said last year : 

152 



An Official Opinion 153 

"It cannot be even plausibly urged that the 
effect of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act 
has so far been injurious or damaging." 

The Wellington Times says : 

"The result has been a great spread of indus- 
trial peace." 

In the report recently submitted to the Vic- 
torian government by the Honourable R. W. 
Best, its Minister for Lands, of a tour of inves- 
tigation made by him in New Zealand to study 
its land and labour laws, he quotes the following 
to show how some of the principal employers 
regard the act : 

"Speaking at a special meeting of the Dunedin 
Chamber of Commerce, on October 19, 1897, to 
consider certain bills then before Parliament, 
Mr. James Mills, Managing Director of the 
Union Steamship Company, and one of the 
largest employers of labour in New Zealand, is 
reported by the Otago Daily Times to have 
said that 'personally he thought the Conciliation 
and Arbitration Act was a very beneficial one 
and one of the most important that had been 
passed, and he felt that they were under a debt 
of gratitude to the present government and Mr. 
Reeves for maturing the bill in its present shape. 
Probably the measure was capable of improve- 
ment, and it would be improved from time to 
time, but he was sure that compulsory arbitra- 



154 A Country Without Strikes 

tion was the true solution of all labour difficul- 
ties/ " 

In an address by the Right Honourable 
Richard J. Seddon, the Premier of New Zea- 
land, at a representative gathering of London 
capitalists interested in the mining industry, one 
of the strongest points which the Premier made 
to encourage the investment of English capital 
in New Zealand mines, was the stability given 
to business enterprise by the Arbitration Law. 

"With us," he said, "a strike of the miners is 
impossible, as it is also impossible for the owner 
of the mine to shut down. That is a condition 
of things which does not prevail anywhere else. 
There is a safeguard for you. The result has 
been this, that even the employers, who were the 
first to object to that legislation, are to-day the 
strongest in favour of it, because where they 
have strikes of any kind where there is a large 
amount of capital invested, the effect of that 
capital being laid up for weeks, and exactions 
being demanded which that capital could not 
bear, would be as disastrous as it would be to 
our mining. The law, as it stands now, has 
prevented disputes, which, if there had been an 
industrial struggle, must have meant a loss of 
about a million of money to us as a small com- 
munity, whereas, the whole cost of the proceed- 
ings, and the whole thing summed up, would not 
amount to £1,000." 



When Wages Fall 155 

There is a growing tendency in the later 
cases towards the admission of lawyers, and to 
a narrower interpretation of its powers by the 
court itself. 

Besides the grocers, the court has in 1900 
excluded street-car men and livery stable em- 
ployes as not engaged in "industrial" pursuits. 

The drift of the reasoning of the court ap- 
pears to be that no occupations are "industrial" 
except manufacturing. 

The workingmen have appealed to govern- 
ment to introduce legislation as soon as Parlia- 
ment opens to safe-guard the act from such 
hostile interpretation. 

This reasoning of the court would also ex- 
clude seamen; and yet the act was expressly 
passed to make a recurrence of the disastrous 
Maritime Strike of 1890 impossible. 

Common-sense, the New Zealand critics of 
these decisions say, would seem to insist that 
where strikes are, there is the field of the law. 

The stability which arbitration gives to busi- 
ness contracts in New Zealand is unknown, as 
its Premier said, to any other business men in 
the world. After an award, the New Zealand 
business man can make his contracts for one or 
two years ahead, with no fear of any "labour 
troubles." 

The law is, as one of the labour members in 
the Upper House admitted, a two-edged sword. 



156 A Country Without Strikes 

It has been cutting in favour of the workingmen 
in the present rising market ; it will cut in favour 
of the employers in the falling market which 
must come. 

One of the most successful employers and 
capitalists in the country described to me the 
situation of the employer under compulsory ar- 
bitration as one of "perfect comfort." 

"Under the old system," he said, "our differ- 
ences with our men had to be settled by a brutal 
fight. Now two committees meet before the 
court, and meanwhile the industry goes on just 
as if nothing were the matter." 

He quoted to me the manager of one of the 
largest coal companies in the colony as declaring 
to him that, although he had always been op- 
posed to the present ministry, he had to admit 
that this law was a magnificent thing for any 
statesman to have done for his country. 

"We know now just what to count on," he 
said. 

This testimony added to that just given from 
one of the largest steamship companies, and the 
attitude of the majority of the manufacturers in 
the shoe trade, furniture trade, and the clothing 
trade — among the most important industries of 
New Zealand — show how favourable the most 
influential manufacturers of New Zealand are 
to compulsory arbitration. 



Compulsion Means Peace 157 

I heard of no case in which an employer had 
been crippled, or an industry hurt, by an award. 
That there have been no "intolerable" decisions 
may be fairly inferred from the fact that all the 
awards have been obeyed, and that in only a 
very few cases have penalties had to be laid, and 
these have always sufficed to end the trouble. 

When the Arbitration law was before Parlia- 
ment, one of the leaders of the opposition pre- 
dicted that "it would cause disturbances in our 
industrial world which it would be powerless to 
control.' ' 

As a matter of fact, the number of disturb- 
ances which have occurred have been limited to 
a little less than one a month, and the "disturb- 
ances" have only been debates before the court. 
Five years of complete peace is worth some- 
thing. 

The London Times and its correspondent, 
"R," united in the declaration "that a compul- 
sory arbitration court has no more power to 
prevent industrial war than an arbitrator mutu- 
ally chosen under the English system." 

Under the New Zealand system industrial 
war has ceased. Under the English system it 
continues unabated. 

The opinion of the working people is pro- 
nounced in favour of the law. Nearly every 
trade-union in the colony has registered, and 



158 A Country Without Strikes 

many trades that were unorganised have formed 
themselves into unions to secure its benefits. 

At a recent conference of representatives of 
the trade and labour bodies of the colony held in 
Christchurch, April, 1899, every proposal for an 
amendment of the Arbitration Act was voted 
down, except one in favour of having the em- 
ployes of the government admitted to its 
benefits. 

More conclusive even than the opinions of 
leading business men and trade-union conven- 
tions, and the principal journals of the colony, 
and more representative of the opinion of the 
community as a whole, is the attitude which 
Parliament has come to take with regard to the 
Compulsory Arbitration law. It has already 
been told how the fierce opposition with which 
the first project of the law was met in 1892, had 
most of it disappeared as the result of three 
years' consideration when the bill came to be 
passed in 1894, and how the bill received the 
support of the leaders of the opposition. 

The operation of the law has brought it into 
increasing favour. The act was amended in 
1896, and again in 1898, and the records of Par- 
liament show that in both cases the amending 
acts went through without material opposition, 
or hostile debate. 

The amending act of 1898 was an especially 



Parliament Almost Unanimous 159 

important one, and one which should have 
aroused whatever latent opposition there may 
have been, for its purpose was to effectuate the 
"compulsion" by making the provisions for 
penalties in case of disobedience enforceable. 
By this time, 1898, the act had been in active 
operation for over two years. If there had been 
any deep feeling against the law, if real harm 
was being done to business, if any poignant 
pain was being caused to the lovers of "liberty" 
and "freedom of contract," it should certainly 
have found expression at that opportunity. But 
there was none. Mr. Reeves described w T hat 
happened in one of his letters to the London 
Times, in December, 1898: 

"Only last month a friendly amending act, 
meant to clear up and emphasise certain sections 
of the act, and cure a legal flaw supposed to have 
been found in it, was passed through the House 
of Representatives absolutely without any kind 
of opposition; yet the session was, perhaps, the 
stormiest and most contentious held in the 
colony in recent years. This act, somewhat 
modified, passed the Upper House. No other 
government labour bill did." 

The prosperity of the country is incontestable. 
Every year, since 1894, manufactures and all 
industries have been increasing. The statistics 
of deposits in the banks, of the receipts through 



160 A Country Without Strikes 

the custom-houses, of the accumulation of 
wealth, the business of the railroads, the settle- 
ment of land and the growth of population, the 
transactions of the post-office, have all revealed 
a steady improvement. Capital has not fled the 
country, but is glad to remain among the wing- 
less birds for which New Zealand is famous. 
Nearly every New Zealand newspaper reports 
some new enterprise undertaken by capital, do- 
mestic or foreign. Friends of the law did not 
claim to me that it had caused this prosperity, 
but they pointed out that it completely disproved 
the predictions that ruin would follow it. 

"Arbitration without compulsion is a sham," 
was the conclusion which Mr. Reeves drew from 
the studies which he had made of the experi- 
ments of other countries, in presenting his bill 
to Parliament. 

The same conclusion is reached in an interest- 
ing tract on "State Arbitration and the Living 
Wage," issued by the Fabian Society of Eng- 
land, which I found being widely read in New 
Zealand. 

"Voluntary arbitration," it says, "can be 
summed up as a universal failure." 

A very remarkable illustration of this is fur- 
nished by the condition of things in Denmark at 
this writing. To break up the building trades' 
organisations, the masters and builders locked 
out forty thousand men, one half of the working 



Conciliation Fails 161 

population of Denmark — as many for Denmark 
as five millions would have been in Great Brit- 
ain. The majority of the press, many of the 
clergymen and leading citizens have sided with 
the men. Public opinion was overwhelmingly 
on their side. 

There is in Denmark an industrial arbitration 
court. It was established at the suggestion of 
the employers, with the consent of the trade- 
unions. Its judgment was invoked in this 
crisis, and its decision was for the men and 
against the masters. But it has no power to 
enforce its award, and the masters have treated 
its decision with complete contempt. 

The paper of the Fabian Society gives the 
latest information as to the results obtained by 
various forms of private arbitration and gov- 
ernment voluntary arbitration in different 
countries. 

Boards, like the Durham Joint Committee in 
England, for the coal trade, have been success- 
ful in settling a number of cases, but such in- 
strumentalities exist only in a few well organised 
trades, and even there they do not settle the 
worst disputes. 

There had been in Great Britain up to the end 
of June, 1897, nine hundred strikes, which the 
government conciliation act had failed to pre- 
vent or terminate. 

In Germany there were four hundred and 



1 62 A Country Without Strikes 

eighty-three strikes in the year 1896, which the 
Industrial Court had no power to prevent. It 
decided twenty cases, and its award was rejected 
in eleven others. 

The Conseils des Prud'hommes in France has 
no power to deal with strikes, nor with disputes 
involving more than $100. Under the law of 
1892, in France, which gives powers of concili- 
ation to the Juge de Paix, there were, in the fol- 
lowing four years, one thousand nine hundred 
and six disputes, of which only 9.28 per cent., 
less than one in ten, were settled successfully. 
The employers refused mediation in one hun- 
dred and sixty nine cases. 

The Massachusetts State Board of Arbitra- 
tion, in 1896, settled sixteen out of twenty-nine 
cases. The New York State Board was able, in 
1896, to settle two per cent, of the two hundred 
and forty-six disputes which occurred in that 
state. 

At this writing a new strike bill is pending in 
the German Parliament. To contemplate its 
provisions is like passing from the mountain air 
of New Zealand into the torture chamber of 
some mediaeval castle on the Rhine. 

The bill provides that any one who attempts 
by physical force, threats, defamation, or boy- 
cott to induce employers or employed to join or 
not to join unions, or become parties to agree- 



A Penitentiary Bill 163 

ments, the object of which is to influence the 
conditions of labour or wages, shall be liable to 
imprisonment not exceeding one year, or, in case 
of extenuating circumstances, to a fine not ex- 
ceeding £50 ($250). 

Should a strike or lockout be forcibly brought 
on, or life, or property, or the security of the 
state jeopardised, the penalty shall be three 
years hard labour, except in the case of ring 
leaders, for whom the maximum penalty shall 
be five years. 

No wonder the bill was at once nicknamed 
the Penitentiary Bill. 

Perhaps on the whole the most notable ex- 
pression of New Zealand public opinion with 
regard to its Compulsory Arbitration law was 
made by Judge Williams of that colony, in a 
letter which he wrote — he was then in London 
— to the London Times, as a contribution to 
the controversy then going on in its columns. 
Judge Williams had been presiding judge of the 
Court of Arbitration. He was not an elective 
judge, nor a re-elective judge, which is still 
worse, and had no occasion to bid for votes even 
had he been capable of doing so. He was no 
longer at the head of the Arbitration Court. He 
belongs, politically and socially, to the class 
which would be by inheritance and acquirement 
least likely to be sympathetic with any form of 



164 A Country Without Strikes 

labour legislation. There could be no more dis- 
interested, no more intelligent testimony than 
his. His letter was widely reprinted by the press 
of the colony, and long as it is, it is reproduced 
here as a valuable contribution to the literature 
of this important question. 

"May I add a word to the discussion which is 
taking place in your columns on the New Zea- 
land Industrial Arbitration Act ? 

"I was President of the Industrial Arbitration 
Court from the time the act was brought into 
operation until April last, 1898, and have had 
some experience of its working. With the in- 
troduction or the framing of the act I had noth- 
ing to do. The act is, of course, imperfect. Any 
act dealing with an entirely new and difficult 
subject must necessarily be imperfect. The 
statutory law of bankruptcy, as it now exists, 
did not spring heaven-born from a single brain, 
but has attained its present state of perfection, 
or imperfection, only after years of experience 
and infinite emendation. I have no doubt also 
that mistakes have been made in the administra- 
tion of the act. Those who are set to perform a 
novel and delicate experiment, however careful 
they may be, not infrequently burn their own 
and other people's fingers. 

"That compulsory arbitration in New Zea- 



No Suggestion of Repeal 165 

land is still in the experimental stage must be 
conceded ; but there are, I venture to think, good 
grounds for hoping that the experiment will be 
ultimately successful. It is certainly not time 
to say that the experiment is a failure. 

"When we find that a number of cases have 
been dealt with under the act, and that since the 
act has been in operation strikes and lockouts 
have practically ceased, it is difficult to say that 
there is no promise of good. That those who 
know where the shoe pinches are content to wear 
it is shown by the fact that no political party 
suggests the repeal of the act, but that both 
parties in the last session of Parliament gave 
their best efforts to amending it. 

"Opinions, of course, differ; but it will -be 
found that the vast majority of the newspapers 
in the colony are favourable to the act, and that 
Parliament, in retaining the act on the statute 
book, and striving to make it more efficient, 
faithfully represented the trend of public opin- 
ion. 

"One good thing the act does is to prevent 
bitter feeling arising. The moment there is a 
difference, the intervention of the Conciliation 
Board is invoked, and, instead of quarrelling 
among themselves and making a settlement 
every day more difficult, each lays his case be- 
fore a third party. 



1 66 A Country Without Strikes 

"Unless you interfere the moment a differ- 
ence arises, you must wait till both parties are 
sick of fighting. The futility of interference in 
the middle of a quarrel is explained by Rabelais 
in one of This cleanest. and most amusing chap- 
ters. In nearly every case that came before the 
court I was struck with the good temper dis- 
played by all parties. 

"Another benefit of the act is that the hearing 
of the case before the Conciliation Board and 
before the court enables'the public to form an 
intelligent opinion upon the merits. If public 
opinion supported the judgment of' the court, it 
would be difficult for either side, apart alto- 
gether from the question, of compulsion, to act 
in defiance of public opinion. 

"No doubt the difficulty of the act lies in the 
clauses which impose a penalty for a breach of 
the^ award. It has been justly said that you 
cannot compel a worlk^an to work or an em- 
ployer to carry on his business under conditions 
which are intolerable to either. *But the duty of 
the Arbitration Court is to pronounce such an 
award as will enable the particular trade to be 
carried on, and not to impose such conditions as 
would make it better fpr the employer to close 
his works or for the workmen to cease working 
than to conform to them. The object of the act 
is to secure industrial peace, and not to create 
industrial strife. 



A Successful Experiment 167 

"I suppose that at present every employer in 
the Kingdom is working under some conditions 
with respect to his workmen that he would like 
to get rid of, and that every trade-union would 
in the same way like to improve the conditions 
under which its members are employed. Yet as 
both employer and workman get their living by 
carrying on the business, each prefers to submit 
to some restrictions rather than risk his liveli- 
hood by a lockout or a strike. 

"It is, of course, natural for each side to try 
and get rid of the conditions which in England 
arise from the relations of the parties, and in 
New Zealand are imposed by the court. 

"The object of the penalty clause is, I take it, 
to prevent either party from wriggling out of 
these latter conditions. It surely cannot be be- 
yond the reach of human ingenuity to make such 
clauses efficient. However, on this, as on many 
other points, we shall be helped by a wider 
experience. 

"As I have said, the act is an experiment, but 
an experiment with good hopes of success. In 
four or five years we shall be able to speak with 
more certainty. Even, however, if in New 
Zealand the act should be permanently success- 
ful, it by no means follows that it should suc- 
ceed under the very different conditions which 
obtain here. 

"The act at any rate is a bold and honest at- 



1 68 A Country Without Strikes 

tempt to grapple with one of the most difficult of 
our social problems, and I submit that its opera- 
tion is worthy of careful study. It is yet too 
early to pronounce a final judgment on our at- 
tempt; but even if the attempt should fail, the 
failure may give light to a better way." 

One of the unexpected effects of the new in- 
stitution is that the benefit of the better wages 
and conditions established by the Arbitration 
Court reach other workingmen, though they 
were not concerned in the proceedings before it. 

I learned of a case in which a large contractor 
had hired a carpenter without specific agreement 
as to his wages. When pay day came the work- 
man refused to accept the pay tendered him, as 
it was less than had been fixed for the trade by 
recent arbitration. He summoned his employer 
before a magistrate not of the Arbitration 
Court. This employer, though one of the larg- 
est in Wellington, was not a member of the 
employers' association, and had not been brought 
under the award which had been made govern- 
ing the trade ; but the magistrate held that that 
award fixed "the custom of the trade," and that 
the employer must pay this customary rate of 
wage. 

The judges of the Arbitration Court have 
done very little legislating under cover of inter- 



Some New Principles 169 

pretation, as courts have been known sometimes 
to do, but in their decisions there is a clear ten- 
dency towards the establishment of some new 
principles in business. It would be inevitable 
that something of the kind should be developed 
when an institution so novel and so powerful 
was introduced into the belligerent chaos of 
modern industry. A handful of sugar crystals 
thrown into a vat of sorghum syrup makes the 
whole mass, until then obdurate, crystallise at 
once. 

In the dispute between the Westport Coal 
Company and its men, the court said : 

"If work is slack and the men wish, the com- 
pany is recommended to distribute the work 
among the men rather than to discharge em- 
ployes." 

And again it said, "that so long as there are 
efficient, capable men at Denniston out of work 
the company shall employ these, either by con- 
tract or day labour . . . before the com- 
pany calls for tenders from outsiders or em- 
ploys outsiders." 

As to these awards, the Secretary for Labour 
makes the comment that they "affect principles 
in the relation of employer and employed hither- 
to considered as being entirely within the do- 
main of private judgment and freedom of con- 
tract." 



170 A Country Without Strikes 

Arbitration does not remove the bottom evil 
of all in the labour world, the economic inequal- 
ity of masters and men which makes a free con- 
tract impossible because one of the parties is not 
free; but it certainly adds a humanising touch 
to the methods of the struggle, and all civilisa- 
tion is lifted a stage. 

The workingman is certainly less at a disad- 
vantage under a system in which he is guaran- 
teed the right to be heard, and to be heard in 
public, than under the present capitalists' regime 
where he is so often refused any hearing, public 
or private. The workers are safer before a 
Court of Arbitration than before a General 
Manager or a Board of Directors, or a general 
fixing wages by martial law. 

The New Zealand court has but just touched 
in its decisions on the most important principle 
at issue in the regulation of wages — whether 
wages must follow prices or prices wages. Must 
wages be dependent on prices necessary to mar- 
ket commodities, or must these prices be depend- 
ent on the wages necessary to maintain the peo- 
ple in decent comfort? 

The workingman's mind is evidently moving 
to the latter position. Several of the greatest 
strikes of recent years, like the English coal 
strike of 1893, and the strike in Lord Penrhyn's 
quarries, have had the "living wage" for their 



Judges and Political Economy 171 

inspiring principle, and this new position of the 
workingmen in those strikes received the open 
support of some of the most influential members 
of Parliament, newspapers, and even capitalists 
of Great Britain. 

This doctrine seeks to make true the fiction 
of John Stuart Mill that wages are determined 
by the standard of living among the working- 
men. What. John Stuart Mill said was the 
law of wages, the workingmen are seeking to 
bring about. The New Zealand law, the mo- 
ment this new political economy that prices must 
follow wages invades the bench, can be made a 
powerful instrument in reinforcing the working- 
men. Decisions made by judges in industrial 
matters can usually be observed to be based not 
so much on "law" as on their notions of political 
economy. 

A way in which the workingmen as voters 
could secure the introduction of compulsory ar- 
bitration is suggested by the Fabian Society in 
the tract to which we have just referred. 

Local authorities can "make it a condition of 
the contract that all disputes between employer 
and workingmen shall be referred to arbitra- 
tion" in contracts given out by them. 

Important as the Conciliation Boards and Ar- 
bitration Courts of New Zealand are in their 
special field of labour troubles, they have an 



172 A Country Without Strikes 

aspect even more important. They are the only 
cheap, informal, speedy courts of justice which 
exist anywhere. In these New Zealand courts 
alone do the people get a taste of that cheap and 
speedy justice of which they have always been 
dreaming, which the agitators, in the days of the 
Puritan Commonwealth, begged might be made 
to break forth out of the ground like a fountain. 
In these courts another field has been added to 
the social territory wrested from the region of 
private war and violence, and another baron or 
strong man has been harnessed to the collar of 
the common good. 

The spirit of the law in this aspect is admir- 
ably voiced in a paragraph in Secretary Tre- 
gear's report for the Department of Labour in 
1898. In opposing the proposition that all the 
costs of the board should be charged to the dis- 
puting parties, Mr. Tregear said : 

"Great care must be taken lest the usefulness 
of the acts be crippled by the fear of extreme 
expense. In such cases, justice becomes a 
luxury only to be enjoyed by the rich, and the 
present merit of the act, namely, that it reaches 
down to remove the tiniest industrial irritant — 
would be lost. It is better that the country 
should bear the slight expense attending the sit- 
ting of boards than that one citizen should have 
to say, T am oppressed and unjustly treated, 
but am not rich enough to make my complaint 



The Wards of Wealth 173 

reach the ears of those in power; I must suffer 
in silence.' . . . The reproach often used 
in the past concerning courts of justice and the 
part played in them by the power of wealth 
should never be allowed to be cast upon the 
Court of Arbitration, and, although perhaps it 
may be idealistic to hope that one day justice 
may be dispensed free of charge to all, still in 
this matter the. country may draw near the ideal 
by taking on itself the burden of its weaker 
members at a cost infinitesimal when divided 
among all, and it will be repaid by the steadiness 
with which the general level of industrial life 
will be sustained." 

We all preach that the property and ability of 
each — the ten talents — exist for the service of 
all. That is the bottom doctrine of all civilisa- 
tion. We open the oldest book we have, the 
"Precepts of Ptah Hotep," and we find it there. 
New Zealand practises it in a new field. 

New Zealand has made the most important 
advance in the practical enforcement of this 
doctrine of the stewardship of wealth. It is 
the first to establish that, in this field of the re- 
lations of labour and capital, the steward is not 
to be left to himself to determine how he is to 
administer the trust. 

Industries, it is a fundamental thought in this 
New Zealand legislation, are not individual cre- 
ations; they are not made by the workingmen 



174 A Country Without Strikes 

alone nor by capital alone, but are a social cre- 
ation and subject to social control. Every manu- 
facture, every investment, has been brought 
to where it is now by long ages of social effort. 
It is kept going to-day by the co-operation of all 
the people in countless ways, not the least 
among them the protection which the people 
gives, through the state. 

If property is a trust, says the spirit of New 
Zealand legislation not only in this but in other 
laws, it is the interests of the ward that are para- 
mount, not those of the trustee; the ward must 
have something to say, and the state must pro- 
tect the ward and regulate the trustee. 

The Compulsory Arbitration law of New 
Zealand and its laws for progressive taxation, 
land resumption, and labour regulation, are, in 
truth, the most advanced applications yet made 
in the modern world of the doctrines of Carlyle 
and Ruskin and all the great poets, that captains 
of industry are captains in the public service; 
that the labourers and the employer alike are 
social functionaries; that to labour and to lead 
labour are duties which no citizen has a right to 
disregard ; that they who do not work, shall not 
eat, nor, says the Compulsory Arbitration law, 
shall they fight, which most men would rather 
do than eat. 

The Compulsory Arbitration law is an at- 
tempt to realise in its field the loftiest teachings 



The Great Question 175 

of the loftiest apostles of the religion of human- 
ity, the religion of labour and love. 

From the ideal point of view, it is a very 
crude attempt, a mere rudimentary beginning, 
but, from the practical point of view, it is one of 
the surest forward steps yet made by any people. 

These people, by undertaking thus to enforce 
the social duties of industry, will be all the more 
likely to take the other steps that their new path 
will call for. It is, for instance, imperative that 
they educate every citizen to industry, and that 
then they guarantee him the opportunity of 
industry. 

Compulsory arbitration is only a step in that 
direction, but it is a step. The greatest eco- 
nomic question involved in compulsory arbitra- 
tion is, whether property and business shall be 
distributed by the methods of reason and 
brotherliness, or by the methods of force and 
mere greed; whether men shall have a fair 
chance according to their ability, enterprise, 
prudence and self-respect, or whether all the 
business chances shall go to the most unscrupu- 
lous and greedy, regardless of all other intellect- 
ual or moral qualities. 

It is a question of the deepest force at work 
in the distribution of wealth; it is an economic 
question, economic all the more because it is 
also an ethical question. 

New Zealand answers this question as the 



176 A Country Without Strikes 

progress of civilisation always has answered it. 
An act which seemed merely to contemplate 
peace in industry, if it proves permanently suc- 
cessful will turn out to be a powerful instrument 
in the democratisation of industry, the equalisa- 
tion of economic conditions, the humanising of 
life, and the expansion of civilisation into a 
new world. 

A genius, says Ralph Waldo Emerson, shows 
himself by carrying an existing idea or an insti- 
tution a step farther than it had gone before. 
Many a man, he says, before him has taken the 
first, second or third steps. The genius which 
conceived and framed the Compulsory Arbitra- 
tion law answers exactly to this description. 
It has taken the old institution of the court, the 
old ideas of peace and justice, and has carried 
them on into a new field. It has made no break 
with the past, but has developed all its familiar 
and venerable processes one step farther in their 
social evolution. 

The establishment of a court in a field where 
only violence had been the judge before, the ad- 
vance of the principles and institutions of civil 
law into social territory given over to anarchy, 
is always one of the great events. The emer- 
gence of the Geneva tribunal of 1872, above the 
troubled waters of international belligerency 
was such an event. 



International Arbitration 177 

The Compulsory Arbitration law of New 
Zealand is such an event in a world of wars not 
less devastating than those between nations. It 
is an event more entirely without precedent in 
the sphere of business, and of more startling 
interest than it would have been in the sphere of 
politics, if the powers in the Peace Congress at 
The Hague had set up an authority, as some 
peace congress some day will do, to forbid all 
war, and had clothed it with the force to make 
its prohibition good. As soon as the majority 
of nations want international arbitration they 
will have it, but it can come only by compulsory 
arbitration as long as there is one nation fool 
enough or knave enough to prefer to fight. 

Perhaps the greatest aspect of the law of New 
Zealand is this — that it "blazes the trail" along 
which international arbitration must move, if it 
would succeed. 

We discover then that in New Zealand, in 
compulsory arbitration, we are dealing not 
merely with a novelty in a subordinate field of 
legislation, but with a new growth of the living 
organism of modern society. 

There is only one Compulsory Arbitration 
law in the world, and that has been in operation 
only four years and in an isolated country, and 
we must not generalise too freely. Similar laws 
might operate differently in different countries; 



178 A Country Without Strikes 

this law may still be crippled by sinister amend- 
ments moved by false friends. 

Not forgetting this, let us sum up the results 
and tendencies of compulsory arbitration as evi- 
denced in actual incidents of the industrial life 
of New Zealand, in the last four years : 

1st. Strikes and lockouts have been stopped. 

2d. Wages and terms have been fixed so that 
manufacturers can make their contracts ahead 
without fear of disturbance. 

3d. Workingmen, too, knowing that their 
income cannot be cut down nor locked out, can 
marry, buy land, build homes. 

4th. Disputes arise continually, new terms 
are fixed, but industry goes on without inter- 
ruption. 

5th. No factory has been closed by the act. 

6th. The country is more prosperous than 
ever. 

7th. The awards of the Arbitration Court fix 
a standard of living which other courts accept in 
deciding cases affecting workingmen. 

8th. Awards made by compulsory arbitration 
are often renewed by a voluntary agreement 
when they expire. 

9th. Trade-unions are given new rights, and 
are called upon to admit all competent working- 
men in the trade. 

10th. Compulsion in the background makes 
conciliation easier. 



A Summary 179 

nth. Compulsory publicity gives the public, 
the real arbitrator, all the facts of every dispute. 

1 2th. Salaried classes as well as wage-earners 
are claiming the benefits of arbitration. 

13th. Peaceable settlement with their men 
has been made possible for the majorities of the 
employers who wanted to arbitrate, but were 
prevented by minorities of their associates. 

14th. Labour and capital are being organised 
into trade-unions and associations instead of 
mobs and monopolists. 

15th. Trade honesty is promoted by the ex- 
posure and prevention of frauds on the public. 

1 6th. Humane and law-abiding business men 
seek the protection of the law to save themselves 
from destruction by the competition of inhu- 
mane and law-breaking rivals. 

17th. The weak and the strong are equalised 
both among capitalists and the workingmen. 

1 8th. The victory is given as nearly as pos- 
sible to the right instead of to the strong, as in 
war. 

19th. The concentration of wealth and power 
are checked. 

20th. The distribution of wealth is deter- 
mined along lines of reason, justice, and the 
greatest need, instead of along lines of the great- 
est greed. 

2 1 st. Democracy is strengthened by these 
equalisations. 



180 A Country Without Strikes 

22d. It furnishes the people their only cheap, 
speedy, and untechnical justice. 

If the American people have any lesson to 
learn from these experiences of New Zealand, 
they can be trusted to learn it. The object of 
the writer has not been to enforce his views, but 
to present the facts of an interesting social ex- 
periment, on which the public could, if it chose, 
build views of its own. 

Of course, "our circumstances are different." 
Our circumstances have not been so different 
but that they have developed the same evils. 
Perhaps they may develop the same remedy. 

The New Zealanders have had several great 
advantages. They are a people of one race, and 
they are isolated. That they are united by race 
is an accident. Union can be also achieved by 
moral will, as doctors used to say of the healing 
of a wound, "by first intention,'' or "by immedi- 
ate union," to use the newest phrase. 

Men of almost every race have united to form 
the politics and society of these United States. 
Why can they not unite to reform them ? And 
as for the isolation, that is a fortunate incident 
for the weak, but the United States has a nobler 
kind of isolation in its might and wealth. It 
can stand alone for any cause it chooses to 
espouse. 



INDEX. 



Agitators, 146. 

Appeals, 29, 151. 

Apprentices, 48, 52, 72, 99. 

Arbitration and competition, 45, 
58, 99, 103. 
— Compulsory, 35 ; 
—Court, 18, 19 ; powers of, 23. 
— awards, 24 ; 
— delay, 80 ; 

— government employees, 31 ; 
— international, 177 ; 
— Massachusetts, 8, 162 ; 
— organization of labor and cap- 
ital, 62. 

— payment of arbitrators, 24, 
152 ; 

— private, 7, 18, 35, 44, 114, 125, 
160 ; 

— promotes trades unions, 76 ; 
— protects employers, 45. 

Arbitration by trade tribunals, 49. 

Association of employers, 58. 

Auckland — boot and shoe manu- 
facturers, 37 ; clothing manu- 
facturers, 92; sewing women, 90. 

Awards, 26 ; appeal from, 30 ; 
— duration of, 51, 134 ; 
— enforcement of, 16, 149 ; 
—intolerable, 122 ; 
—penalties for violation, 26, 27, 
29, 138, 140, 149, 166 ; 
—uniform, 133'. 

Bakers, 66. 

Best, Hon. R. W., 153. 

Books, must be produced, 22, 51, 
145. 

Boot and shoe men, 33, et seq. 

Capital, organization under arbi- 
tration, 62 ; 
— a wingless bird, 160. 

Coal Mining Company, 75. 

Clothing manufacturers' associa- 
tion, 107. 

Clothing trade, 89. 



Committees or mobs, 61, 62. 
Competition and arbitration, 45, 

58, 84, 99, 103. 
Compulsion, 11, 20, 42, 52, 119, 125; 

— and the law of the market, 

123 ; 

— in other legislation, 126; 

— threefold, 16; 

— voluntary, 127. 
Compulsory arbitration, cost of, 

152; 

— and democracy, 176; 

— and distribution of wealth, 

175; 

— under municipalities, 171; 

— new principles in business, 

169; 

— in Parliament, 129, 158. 

— South Australia, 14. 
Compulsory arbitration law, 

amendment, 8a, 109, 124, 147, 158, 

159; 
Compulsory arbitration law, 

analysis of, 16, 178; 

— appeal, 151 ; 

— awards renewed voluntarily, 

178; 

— evasions, 14 ; gives stability to 

business, 155 ; 

— justice in a new field, 176 ; 

— spirit of, 174 ; 

— summary of results, 178. 
Compulsory publicity, 97. 
Conciliation, Boards of, 11, 16, 18, 

iq, 23, 29, 30. 
Conciliation, voluntary, 105, 
Conseils des Prud'hommes, 7, 162. 
Costs, 24. 

Denmark, lockout, 160. 
Disturbance of industry, 146, 147, 

157. 
Durham Joint Committee, 161 . 
Educational influence, 85. 
Edwards, Judge, 2, 123, 131, 137. 



181 



182 



INDEX. 



Employers associations, 25, =;8 
61; 

— cannot escape, 62, 67, 145. 
— favor compulsory arbitra- 
tion, 102, 153, 156 ; 
— how summoned, 66; 
— preference to, 8S ; 
— promote trade unions, 104 ; 
— registration of, 32 ; 
— representation of, 146 ; 
— resistance to arbitration, 144 : 
— summoned individually, 22. 
Engineers, 69, 
— strike, 118. 
Equalization of conditions, 109. 
Experiments, 4, 12, 165. 
Experts, 20, 46, 51, 94, 123. 
Fabian Society tract, 160. 
Fines, 27, 139. 
France, 7, 162. 
Frauds prevented, 97. 
Frivolous cases, 25, 146, 
Furniture workers, 136. 
Germany, new strike bill, 162 ; 

— strikes, 161. 
Gold miners, 65, 132, 145. 
Government employees, 31. 
Great Britain, arbitration laws, 7. 
Grocers' employees, 77. 
Hague, Peace Congress, 177. 
Hereford, Bishop of, 117. 
Hours, 48, 52, 99, 132. 
Impartiality of the Court, 74. 
Imprisonment, 29, 120, 139 
Industrial Corporation of New 

Zealand, 147. 
Initiative of the state, 87. 
International arbitration, 177 
Intolerable decisions, 27, 120. 
Iron moulders, 64, 133 
Iron workers, Auckland, 61. 
Iron workers, 135, iw. 
Jennings, Honourable W. T., 101. 
Judges, business, 3, 69, 130. 
Judge, presides, 20. 
Labor organization under arbi- 
tration, 62. 
Law of the market, 122. 
Lawyers, 22, 43, 84, 155. 
Livery stable men excluded, 155. 
Living wage, 170. 
Lockouts forbidden, 20, 
Machinery, 48. 
Machinists, 99. 



Majority rule, 4', no, 125, 127. 
Mandamus, 79. 

Manufacturers, boot and shoe, 32 
et seq.; clothing, 92, 107 ; unor- 
ganize 1 , 56, 99 ; 
— promote trade unions, 91. 
Maritime strike, 5. 147. 
Massachusetts, arbitration, 8. 162. 
Mills, James, 153. 
Mill, John Stuart, 171. 
i Minimum wage, 48, 71, 78, 83, 95. 
I Minorities and arbitration, 97, 
102, 114, 119. 

Mobs or committees, 61. 
Monkswell, Lord, 117. 
New South Wales, punishment of 
strikers, 149. 

— voluntary arbitration, 9. 
New York, arbitration, 162. 
Non-unionists, under arbitration, 

48, 66. 
Organization of labor; of capital, 
18, 62. 
} Overtime, 48, 78, 99. 
, Painters, 133. 
! Parliament and arbitration, 29, 

158. 
! Passion lessened, 85, 166. . 

Pay of arbitrators, 24. 
i Peace Congress, 177. 
i Penalties, 27, 138 et seq., 157, 166. 
' Piece work, 48, 52, 99. 
I Pitt, William, 126. 
J Printers, 136. 

I Prosperity under compulsory ar- 
bitration, 11, 152, 159. 
Ptah Hotep, 173. 
1 Publicitv, 22, 121, 128. 
Public opinion, 31. 
"R", 117. 

Railroad employees, 31. 
Range makers. 76. 
Reeves, Hon. Wm. P., 6, is, 27, 30, 

87, 89, 116. 
Registration of employers, 32, 61; 

— of trade unions, 17, 32, 6x. 
Reinstatement of discharged 

men, -5. 
Rigg, Honourable John, 74, 104. 
Seamen, 66, 67, 155. 
Seddon, Right Honourable R. J., 

154- 
Sewing Women's Union, 89. 
Ship owners, 68. 



INDEX. 



183 



Shirt makers, 95. 
Shoemakers, 32. 
Shoe manufacturers, 13Q. 
South Australia, 14, 17, 21, 135. 
Street car men excluded, 155. 
Strike, Auckland, 38. 
Strike, the boot, cost of, 46. 
Strike, in court room, 3. 
Strike, maritime, 5, 147. 
Strikers punished in New South 

Wales, 149. 
Strikes, 146. 

—England, coal strike of 1893, 

170; 
- — Europe, 10 ; 

—forbidden, 20 ; 

— France, 162 ; 

— Germany, 161 ; 

—Great Britain, 118, 161 ; 

— Xew South Wales, 9 ; 

—in Lord Penrhyn's quarries, 

T70 ; 
Sweating, 49, 52 ; shops, 89. 
Tailors and tailoresses, 93. 
Tailoresses, increased pay, 105. 
Thring, Lord, 117. 
Times, London, 116, 157 ; 

— Judge Williams in, 16-5. 
Trade unions, 16, 26. 

— demand compulsion, n ; 

— favor the law, 158 ; 

— given new rights, 18 ; 

— must be inclusive, 82 ; 

—must give preference, 88 ; 

— must register, 17, 32. 



Trade unions, preference to, 47, 

52, 53, 56, 57, 64, 65, 68, 69, 75, 78, 

82, 95, 99, 106, 124, 151 ; 

— preference to, withheld, 65, 

66; 

— promoted by employers, 104 ; 

— discharged members of, re- 
instated, 75 ; 

— register of members out of 

work, 81 ; 

—registration of, 32 ; warning 

to, 145. 
Trade unionists discharged, 101. 
Tregear, Secretary, 30, 169. 172. 
Trusts and arbitration, 88. 
Tyranny, 117. 

Union Steamship Company, 153. 
Visitation, powers of, 22. 
Wages, 52, 99> 134, 138; 

— fixed by arbitration, 168; 

— fixed by law, 128, 129; 

— living, 170; 

— maximum fixed, 71. 

— minimum, 48, 71, 83, 95; 

— and prices, 170; 

— under arbitration, 43. 
Wealth, stewardship, 173. 
Westport Coal Company, 169. 
Williams, Judge, in the London 

Times, 163. 
Witnesses. 22 

Witnesses, compensation, 24. 
Women workers, 76, 89. 
Work continues during arbitra- 
tion, 46, 54, 113. 



'900 



